Eight Simple Rules: Bridget Returns
by Thor2000
Summary: Following Eight Simple Rules: Bridget, Bridget's secret identity continues in a multiple series crossover. Being a costumed crimefighter is difficult, but five years since she vanished, she has to keep her identity secret from Leonard and Sheldon.
1. Chapter 1

High above the height of most Canadian geese in the misty and dark blue heavens of the canopy that covered the planet, Lily Truscott enjoyed the pleasures and benefits that was First Class. Her best friend Miley was sleeping against the window, Miley's father was in the seat on the outside aisle across from them. He looked at the teenage girl munching on shrimp, swaying to the voice of Justin Bieber over her earphones and appeared concerned. First Class on Trans-American Airlines was quiet and serene. He knew what it had to be like back in Coach… the screaming babies, the crampt conditions, the surly faces of fellow passengers. The only thing he had to face up here was the possibility of being embarrassed. Wringing his hand across his mouth, he lightly gasped, debated what he was about to do and then went along with it.

"Lily…" He waved his hand before the girl to muster her attention. "Lily?" The girl finally noticed him. "You know, girl… we will be home in another hour. You may want to let up on the shrimp."

"You think so?" Lily looked to him and pulled her headphones down. "I wonder if they got any sushi left?"

"Good night, girl…." Robby Ray Stewart made a face of disbelief. "Where do you put it all?"

"What do you mean?" Lily looked back as the plane lightly shuddered from turbulence. Robby looked at her, back across the empty row of seats by him and toward the big guy on the opposite window seats. Actress Alex Lambert was in a seat two rows up studying a script. World-renown chef Andrew Zimmern was in a window seat checking his messages on his phone. Looking up at Robby, the chubby guy chuckled a bit at his situation and glanced once at his book before looked back to Robby.

"Your daughter really likes the seafood…" He commented.

"She's not my daughter, she's my daughter's best friend." Robby explained.

"You're Robby Ray, aren't you." The big guy beamed with a large smile filling out his whiskers. "My mom used to listen to your records." He reached across to shake hands. "I'm Hugo Reyes…"

"You're the owner of those Cluck Bucket restaurants…" Robby shook his hand back. "I can't keep my son Jackson from ordering from your Malibu restaurant…" The plane shuddered again. "Don't these late night flights ever get to you?"

"Only when I go over water…" Reyes recalled a time from his past he was still trying to put behind him. His wife, Libby, stirred next to him, looked at him briefly and tried to get back to sleep. By Robby's side, the female stewardess came up alongside and turned to Lily.

"Yes, ma'am?"

"Can I get some sushi?" Lily asked.

"Oh sweet Georgia Mother Brown…" Robby's Tennessee accent responded out of disbelief as the plane shuddered again. This time the "Fasten Your Seatbelts" came on and another stewardess hurried down the aisle past Reyes, through the food and drink prep area and back into coach over the wing section of the plane with the over-crowded middle class passengers. In 15A and 15B, Gabrielle Montez struggled with sleep and studied her physics textbook. Her fiancé, Troy Boyden, opened his eyes at her and noticed her book. He responded a bit amused, his eyes tired with sleep as he blinked, stirred in his seat and lightly yawned while sitting up erect.

"What test are you studying now?" He asked.

"I couldn't sleep." She looked to him with two big brown eyes shining toward him.

"You don't have anything else to read?"

"Like what?"

"You're something else." He chuckled a bit not knowing he was being watched. From 17C, Theresa Russo looked at Troy then to Gabrielle and wished she were her daughter. Both Gabrielle and her middle daughter, Alex, had the long dark hair and were both attractive young girls. The only difference was that Gabrielle seemed to be smart, charming and studious and Alex was not. Turning to her husband, Theresa prodded his right leg for attention and her jarred away from the sensation.

"Jerry…." She looked to him. "Do you think we should call home and check on the kids when we land?"

"What?" He reacted tiredly annoyed. "Justin's in charge."

"It's not him I'm worried about. It's Alex that stresses me out…." Theresa confessed. "And Max part of the time."

"Theresa…" Jerry Russo sighed tiredly and leaned back in his seat. "If there's a problem, Justin can have me home just like that!" He snapped his fingers.

"Problem?" Someone overheard him. "Is there a problem? Are we going to crash?" Adrian Monk pulled out a handkerchief and wiped the sweat from his nervous forehead. He hated flying. It was not so much the flying but the stories of planes crashing that were in the news.

"I said nothing about crashing." Jerry looked to the panic-stricken detective. "My wife and I were talking about our kids."

"Oh, god…" Adrian felt the winds and lightning outside the craft. "We're going to crash. We're going to crash…." His anxiety was rising. His fears were getting worse…

"Excuse me, maybe I can help." A gentleman rose from the seats behind the Russos. "Excuse me, sir…" He moved toward the nervous detective. "I'm a psychiatrist… Dr. Frasier Crane at your service. Look, there is nothing to fear here. All you have to do is put yourself in a peaceful place." The solemn voiced physician tried to help. "Just close your eyes and calm down."

"That stuff never works…" Monk was stressing as the plane trembled again. "My peaceful place doesn't exist…"

"Is he okay?" Another person came down the aisle.

"He's having a panic attack." Frasier looked back and back again. "Are you a doctor?"

"Yes… Howser…" The young man shook hands with Frasier. "Dr. Douglas Howser…" He paused a bit. "My friends call me Doogie…"

"Ah…" Frasier noticed the stewardess coming to ask them to return to their seats, but before she could say a word, Frasier asked her to bring him some sedatives. By this point, other passengers were looking over and wondering what was happening. Gabrielle lifted her head up to look over the seats at the human conflagration. A few seats behind her, father Alan Harper and his son, Jake, looked up briefly with disassociated interest. Jake pretended to glance out the window then back to his father.

"Dad, how long is Uncle Charlie going to stay over in Las Vegas." He asked with teenage ignorance.

"Oh…" Alan looked back to his boy. "He wanted to try the slots again."

"Is that another euphemism for sex?"

"With your uncle, you never really can tell." Alan tried settling down again to rest, but he was too awake and eager to get back home. On the other side of the plane, the flight attendant had brought Dr. Crane the sedatives he had asked for to help calm the high-strung detective. Across the rows, other patients slept lightly or deeply from the turbulence. The plane jostled again slightly and then lit up with another lightning strike just beyond the play. Monk loomed his vision outside his porthole and feverishly set himself down in his sleep as Dr. Crane sat by him and tried helping him.

"Look, you just have to calm down." Frasier tried to appeal with him with logic. "I guarantee you. With everything we know about flying today, this plane is not crashing!"

"Yeah…" Howser rested on one knee in the aisle. "Think about it like this. More people die in auto accidents than in plane crashes."

"Oh god…" Monk realized another thought. "I've got to take a ride in a car after I land!"

Crane and Howser looked at each other across the seats. At that moment, there was another sharp lightning strike and the plane jostled from one slight elevation to the next. Howser lost his footing in the aisle and found himself knocked sideways into the lap of Mary Ann Summers-Gilligan. One moment the cookbook authoress was sleeping peacefully on her way home to her home on a Pacific Island resort, and the next, she noticed the thirty-something blonde physician going face first into her lap. She bounced up out of her seat as more passengers began waking up into the shaking flight. There was no sign of danger as the hundred people on board stirred and looked around as the rainless clouds outside batted the plane around like a piñata. One of the harried flight attendants must have asked the pilots to say something because the announcement system squawked on with a brief moment of static white noise.

"Ladies and gentlemen, this is your co-pilot speaking…" It sounded like the voice of God if the divine lord was a thirty-nine year old Star Trek geek who lived in his parent's basement apartment and lived mostly on a diet of sushi, Dr. Pepper and Hot Pockets. "Please excuse the turbulence, but we are putting on the Fasten Your Seat belts sign. We're passing through a dry weather front coming south from off the Sahara basin meeting the Pacific current creating choppy weather conditions, but we are passing through the worst of it and we should be landing at LAX on time within the hour. The temperature in Los Angeles is a balmy seventy-degree temperature with slight winds at thirty miles an hour. I hope you enjoyed your flight and thank you for flying Trans-American Airlines." As he signed off, there was another flash of lightning followed a few seconds behind by the boom of thunder.

"Whoa…" Pilot James Ubriacco saw that lightning strike at wing's length. "That was another close one." He checked his charts. "At least it's not raining."

"Maybe we ought to lift above the clouds again…" His co-pilot Donny Hedges looked out at the foggy and dark sky before them. The only lights they had were the shimmering patterns of light from Los Angeles underneath them accompanied by the trailing pinpricks of light along the freeways extending in all directions under and around them. They couldn't see the mountains or the sea, but they were at 14,500 feet and on descent toward LAX still a bit toward the south. Ronny Kaplan, their navigator, checked their settings and looked forward to his late dinner with his wife.

"We're okay…" Ubriacco grinned with that steely grin again. "I've flown a lot of storms, and besides…" He grimaced assuredly. "Lightning near strikes the same spot twice."

"Correction…" Hedges looked over. "It's more than likely to hit the same place twice."

"Are you sure?"

"My brother used to do weather at WKRP in Cincinnati…" Hedges checked speed and height as another flash briefly blinded them then behind it at the speed of sound was the thunderbolt hitting and jostling the cockpit like an angry child swatting at his toys. Ubriacco felt his head thrown back and forward hard, but before he could complain about the whiplash, he noticed the lights in the cockpit had all gone off in the flash. The system was specially built to handle strikes and lightning, but there were these rare isolated incidents and they were prepared for the likelihood. Bathed in the gray and tinged blue luminescence through their windows, they looked around and checked their switches. Their engines shut down at the same time and although the seasoned pilots couldn't hear their passengers, they could feel the fear and panic.

"Main fuse…" Clipping his seat belts off, Kaplan was out of his seat and to the floor for the hatch into avionics. There was a clang of the hatch and the added light of the emergency lights on reserve power and he dropped into the dark gullet of the immense steel beast expected at Los Angeles Airport. The plane was gliding on momentum for now as his hands moved by instinct over the spare fuses and gripped the new fuse, but now he had to get the old one out and replace it. The cockpit flashed with light again.

"Is that another lightning flash?" Hedges looked up.

"Hold on…"

The plane flew through the thunderclap, and in the belly of the shuddering steel beast, Kaplan sailed backward and hit his head on avionics like a rag doll flailing around in the jaws of a dog. Ubriacco heard the loud thump and rushed to help him as at that point the plane started dipping and he slid sideways toward the angle of gravity. Hedges started pulling up on the stick, but it wasn't moving. This craft was taking a nosedive and they had moments to get the power on to save it.

"Jimmy, get up here!"

"Let me get the fuse first!" Ubriacco looked around for the fallen part then just grabbed a second one. The lost part skipped and skidded further into the bowels of electronics and computer circuitry. Back in First Class, the flight attendants tried to control things in their area. Most of the passengers remained calm, a few fearing the worse. Reyes crossed himself and squeezed his wife's hand. Robby Ray tried to assure his daughter and her friend as actress Alex Lambert nearby crossed herself and clung to her script like a shield. It seemed the plane was dipping more as an unattended drink cart rolled past her joined by a second down the other aisle of the plane. Back in coach, Gabrielle fretted and took Troy's hand as the plane vibrated in the dark thunderstorm, but in the subdued light, she noticed something blocking the moonlight coming through the line of windows along the plane. Several others noticed as well and turned to the fleeting shape as the plane dipped lower. All their eyes could see for a while was the misty clouds and moisture condensing on the outside, but through that was something else. There was a large form on the left wing of the plane over the engine for a minute then it went away from view. It looked like…

No, that was impossible.

There was no such thing as flying people…

…But then there were those reputed sightings of a flying girl in Detroit that spring of 2003.

Her left hand reaching down over the shell of the turbine engine, clad in a blue leotard, red skirt and cape and buffeted by the wind currents she was trying to ride, Bridget Hennessey kept herself on course by her right arm and hoped she could hold this plane up aloft by the wing. This craft was a lot bigger than anything else she had handled. She had helped to land Cessnas, helicopters, private jets but nothing this big before, but she had to give Captain Ubriacco the time to replace the burned fuse to his on-board computer and get it running once more. As she kept the plane on course, cell phones, digital cameras and electronic devices aimed at her through the plane windows from inside the plane were snapping photos, but if any of them actually got anything, it was a red blur or a foggy shape, it would be a miracle. Awake from her nap, Miley Stuart was pinned at her window with Lily watching the blonde apparition at the wing trying to keep them aloft and alive. A few seats behind, Gabrielle and Troy looked at each other in stunned surprise. Jerry Russo grabbed a cell phone camera from a passenger to try and get a photo, but first he had to fight Alan Harper and his son for the view from her window seat.

Electronics started flickering as Ubriacco returned to his seat and tried restarting the engines in flight, but was it too late? The plane was deep into a nosedive straight for a wide section of Los Angeles beneath them. As Bridget tried pulling the ship back heavenward, she was shocked and surprised by the chunk of wing and engine casing ripping off along their seams in her hand and she suddenly shot into another direction without the plane. Sailing upward a hundred feet into the stratosphere, she caught herself rolling head over heels for several minutes until she saw nothing but stars, then dove back down into the ocean of air beneath her and shot down below the moving thunder clouds for the wounded airliner. Her hands furled into fists, her long blonde hair wafting around her furiously, she dived earthward again until she found the descending 747 again. Flying through the tail fins, she skimmed the surface of the fuselage looking for something to hold on to and carry it. The crack around the entry door, the external radar sensors, the landing bay doors… She had to stop this plane from taking out a chunk of one of the most populated cities in the United States. Sliding over the cockpit windows, she reached the cockpit and nose cone and began pressing against it to take it airborne once more. Her teeth gritted together, her eyes watering, she felt her breath racing through her lungs…

"Come on, Bridget…" She whispered herself under the roar of wind and air friction charging past her. "You can do this. You can do this. You saw Brandon Routh do this in that movie." She started pushing upward against gravity as the plane plummeted straight into the center of Los Angeles. Bridget looked down briefly and noticed the familiar sight of the Los Angeles Astrodome beneath her filled with lights, hundreds of people and not a lot of open space.

"Oh, you've got to be kidding me!" She screamed out loud. The massive arena was only eighteen years old, but it was known as the largest open-air arena in possibly the entire United States. Capable of seating almost 18,000 people, the location had seen acts as famous as KISS and the Stones down to the Monkees and a Jem and the Holograms reunion tour. Last month, the Jonas Brothers had played here to large sold-out crowds with Selena Gomes and Demi Lovato along for the ride, and Britney Spears had been here the month before. On the stage below this night, Taylor Swift was singing to a stadium packed with fans, but between lyrics, she heard the screeching noise and tapped her microphone a bit confused. Several of her fans started looking up, and eventually, she noticed the sea of heads turn aloft to see the plane above them. It looked to be in an odd position. It was flying with its nose straight down, and it seemed a lot closer than normal. The screeching sound was getting louder… So much so that crowds of teenagers cupped their ears and started scattering. They ran into each other, ahead of each over and around in fevered insane panic, but a few… a few noticed something else. As the plane came closer to full size, they saw the presence at the tip of the plane. A blonde figure in a red cape feverishly trying to stop it from crashing, and it seemed to be working. As the craft slowed, a vast ripple of kinetic energy rippled through the fuselage popping metal seams. At ground level, the cell phones started getting whipped out to get pictures. It was at a hundred feet… seventy-five as it drew to a slow stop. Bridget was straining… Her jaw clenched in desperation and eyes watering as she refused to look down under her. She felt it slowing, but how much height did she have left? She didn't dare look but she soon realized it. Her left foot touched earth and the weight of the plane pressed her down to the ground once more and dipped again before her hands crushed through the steel, and she finally lifted the plane up. Her chin was to her chest as she opened her eyes gasping and started lowering the almost one hundred tons of steel and aluminum on its undercarriage down across left field between the parting oceans of concertgoers. With a thunderous rumble, the mighty 747 hugged soft earth as its protective angel finally gasped from the strain to her strength. From stage, co-entertainer Kellie Pickler came out to get a better look at the scene. Swift's jaw dropped. How could she top that?

Taylor's fans roared with applause and cheers at the spectacle. Was this real? Was it a movie stunt? Bridget didn't look up; she just levitated aloft and glided up to the entry doors of the grounded plane still in one piece, her fingers piercing the seal around it and pulling it toward her and off to make sure no one was hurt in the jostling around through the atmosphere. Her right foot stepped inside as teenaged concertgoers rushed the plane to get a closer look.

"Is everyone okay?" She spoke with a honeyed voice highlighted by her exhausted breath rushing through her lips. "I hope no one got hurt."

Alex Lambert was struck speechless by the sight of the girl in the Supergirl costume. Was this a gag? Robby Ray was clutching his chest as Lily struggled excitedly at her seatbelt. No one had been tossed out their seats in that fracas, but they had obviously felt every thrust, shake and tremor of the plummeting craft. Amidst the assorted First Class Passengers, Lily jumped into the aisle grinning uncontrollably

"I know you!" She giggled excitedly. "I've read about you since you first appeared in Detroit!" She looked to Miley. "And you said she didn't exist!"

"Where were you when I crashed on that island in the South Pacific!" Reyes undid his belt and stood up on his feet; his stunned and speechless wife by his side. Bridget just stood silently assessing the situation as outside the plane, Taylor Swift fans were climbing up on to the wings of the plane and lifting each other up to try and climb inside it. A light gasp, Bridget's senses perused the sea of voices going on around her. There was confusion, joy and relief, but no one seemed hurt or injured.

"Ladies and gentlemen…" She fussed briefly with her extremely windswept hair. "I hope you won't let this little incident put you off flying." She recited a line from the movie. "Statistically-speaking of course, it's still the safest way to travel." She turned after a light nod of her head and turned out to the entrance door. There was hundreds of kids struggling and fighting to touch her, camera footage trying to broadcast her image on close-circuit screens, but her aura was so powerful that it just recorded and broadcast hazy blurred images. Amidst the sparkling lights of cell phone cameras and hysterical kids, Bridget stepped into the air until she could levitate back into the wind currents. She was ascending higher and higher over the stacked speakers on stage. The cute blonde pop-country singer on stage arched her head skyward and lightly clapped herself watching as Bridget saluted her with a big beaming smile just before vanishing into the atmosphere.


	2. Chapter 2

2

On the south side of Detroit, St. Thomas Hospital loomed up with its dark gray stone structure against the night sky. Only a few lights dotted the darkened exterior. From the front, bright lights illuminated the entrance with fountains and gardens but the back entrance near the Emergency Room could possibly be haunted, and there were many who thought it was. Dr. Johnathan Michael Dorian had heard the stories, but basically ignored them. His life was mostly about being haunted by patients and hypochondriacs. Marcy Walker was the head nurse on charge. She was a chubby, almost cute, brunette matron for her job, but her position was mostly about bad-mouthing the higher staff behind their backs. Dr. Dorian respected her, as did most of the resident doctors, but Marcy's best friend in the hospital was Cate Hennessey. The tall raven-haired medical assistant had been going through a lot of personal issues. Two of her children were away at college, but the oldest had just vanished on her. Bridget's disappearance had pushed her into therapy. Her firstborn daughter's absence had pushed her into depression, sending her into three months of psychoanalysis in the Sterling Heights Medical Center. Her husband, Paul, visited her everyday, and her parents gave her as much support as possible even as their marriage was breaking up. When Cate finally got home, her father had come to live with her, and a year later, Paul gave her nephew C.J. permission to move in as well. Dealing with her father and nephew trading snipes was not easy to deal with at all. Paul eluded the confrontations by rushing to the newspaper where he had once again regained his position as sports writer and was doing the sports commentary on Detroit's WSMV-Television News. Things were going well, but Cate still missed her daughter. She wondered where she was and how she was doing. For part of a month, the police thought they had found Bridget floating in the Rouge Waterway, but that body turned out to be a body washed out of the cemetery by last year's violent storms. Wherever Bridget was, Cate hoped she was well, even as she wandered through her own life with her constantly on her mind. In the hospital's third floor break room, Cate routinely tipped back the coffee pot for her regular dose of caffeine. After pouring a cup, she ripped open two packets of sweetener and poured in their contents. As she tossed away the sugar packets under the counter, she looked over. Oliver the janitor was sitting at the table by her reading the newspaper in the minutes left over from his lunch break before he had to go and clock back in to work. He was reading the article up top about the success rates the local police had using bait cars to catch car thieves, but down below the middle article on traffic flows was a small headline Cate could not avoid not noticing. It read "Costumed Blonde Prevents Near Tragedy." She tried to lean in to read it, but Oliver leaned his big head in to her way. In doing so, he must have seen the same article.

"Hey, guys…" Oliver looked up with his large Frankenstein-like head. "Guess what? Super-babe came home last night."

Somewhat offended at that remark, Cate took her tray and bounced it off his head. Moaning like a wounded buffalo, Oliver scowled, turned his head up and looked up to her like a wounded child.

"Cate?" He looked confused. "What was that for?"

"What?" The brunette working mom reacted ashamed and embarrassed. "Oh, uh, Oliver… I'm so sorry!" She didn't want anyone know it was his remark about Bridget in the paper that had annoyed her. "It was an accident!" She responded like an embarrassed mother, turned round making a shameful face and left the tray in the usual spot for the staff in the hospital cafeteria to pick up later. That was a stupid thing to do, but then anytime "Super-Babe" appeared in Detroit, it was big news. The nameless flying blonde girl in the Supergirl costume had been Detroit's sole local legend for half a year, but then she started increasing her fight plan. She appeared in Chicago, New York City, Boston, San Francisco and then Los Angeles. What was once Detroit's local mysterious phenomenon was now turning up as far away as Brazil and Japan. No one knew where she lived, but everyone wanted to know who she was. Cate just didn't want to share her with the world.

"She's back…." Marcy danced up to Cate giggling.

"Who? What? Where is she?" Cate looked around anticipating good news. "Is she here?"

"Super Blonde…" Marcy gave another newspaper name for the alleged blonde superhero and lead Cate into the Emergency Ward. Like a magician doing a trick, she whipped back the curtain around one of the beds to a police officer guarding his prisoner. Handcuffed to the bed and lying on his stomach was career criminal Lewis De Vore. Wanted in Toledo for the murder of a gang member, the twenty-something on the bed writhed and fussed from his underwear pulled up his back and over his head, driving all parts of his manhood deep into his body where they were not meant to go.

"Lewis De Vore, 27,…" Officer Eric Finlayson started. "We caught him burglarizing a liquor store on Decatur. He tried fleeing the crime, but we found him a block away hanging off a cell phone tower and swearing about some blonde in a Superman costume."

On the other side of the room, Dr. Lizzie Masterson turned away from her appendicitis patient suddenly interested by the conversation.

"What? Did you see her?" Cate bent down next to De Vore. "I mean… did she look okay? Does she look as if she's been eating? How'd she look? Well?" She sounded like a distraught mother.

"What?" De Vore was in too much pain to understand that insane query. Cate just looked back to Marcie and Officer Finlayson with a slight nervous grin, and Marcie looked at her a bit confused. This was not the first time Cate had acted a bit out of it around a Supergirl sighting.

"Oh, um…" Cate tried to nonchalantly repose herself. "The usual… pain-killers, sedatives then cut the underwear off him." She rolled her eyes away and headed over to another patient at another bed, taking their chart to check off her supervision. Standing in the far door to the room, Dr. Masterson watched Cate as her mentor. Her hair was longer now, pulled back into a ponytail over her doctor's white coat. Her head slighted tilted toward Cate as she gestured her over, her slender arms pulling her clipboard to her chest as the two of them turned in unison out into the hall.

"Cate…" Liz was almost a full foot shorter than her friend. "Are you sure you should have returned to work after therapy? I mean… things can get stressful here. Bridget is going to be sending us a lot of business. Are you going to be okay dealing with people who are running into your daughter while you're… not?"

"I can deal with this." Cate liked being able to share her daughter's secret with someone from out of the family. "I need to work. At home, I've got nothing to do except… stress out."

"I know it must be hard sharing your daughter with the world, but Cate…" Liz and Cate stopped several feet from the nurse's station. "She's doing a lot of good in the world."

"But I want her home…." Cate was grieving. "Liz, I miss her so much…. I mean, you'd think in the last few years she could have called me once! Just once!"

"I know…." Liz stopped with her chart pulled to her chest and her All-American blonde good looks beaming back. "Cate…" She rubbed Cate's shoulder with her left hand. "You've got to go home eventually." She paused. "Are you still seeing hallucinations of Bridget around you?"

"Yes…" Cate confessed with a light sigh. "But… how do I know they are hallucinations? Couldn't they just be signs that Bridget is checking in on me? How do I know?"

"Has Paul seen her?"

"No."

"Kerry? Your father?"

"I never told my father about Bridget's powers." Cate confessed secretly in the hallway. "It's only you, me, Paul, Kerry and Rory. No one else." Her exasperated sigh petered out to a tired gasp.

"Cate…." Liz looked up with a long tired breath. "Go home."

"I can't."

"You have to." Liz turned and pointed to the clock. "Your shift was over twenty minutes ago."

"Oh…" Cate looked over. Rhonda had pulled up her purse and jacket and had them waiting on the counter for her a few feet away. An embarrassed sigh on her breath, she looked over to Rhonda and then back to Liz. They were right. She had to go home sooner or later. Except for Bridget's absence in her life, she was right back where she was when her daughter had started the secret and creating her own worldwide urban legend of the flying blonde girl in the "Superman" costume. It wasn't like her daughter was hiding Bigfoot or swimming with the Loch Ness Monster, but it was very close. Cate just had to realize that her daughter was an urban legend, and whether she wanted it this way or not, her status as the world's only possible existing superhero was something she had to live with in her life.

"Honey, I'm home…" She walked into her Maple Street home and tossed her keys into their usual place.

"How was your day?" Her father and husband echoed in unison, paused, looked at each other and grimaced together in competition for her attention.

"My wife…" Paul told his father-in-law.

"My daughter, I had her first." Jim Eagan looked up through his reading glasses from the big easy chair, but it was Paul who Cate headed toward first, kissing her husband on the lips before turning and casually kissing the top of her father's thinning hairline.

"I love you too, dad…" She stroked her father's shoulder briefly. "So…" She looked to Paul. "You're home tonight."

"Yeah…." Paul exuberantly turned to the kitchen. "And I brought dinner home too."

"It's got cabbage. You know I can't eat cabbage." Ed reminded Paul.

"Then don't eat it!" Paul sniped back at him. He mugged and turned back to his wife. "Cate, he's been getting on my nerves a lot more. It's as if we have another kid… one who's old and senile."

"Watch it…" Ed flipped the newspaper up from his lap to read more of it. "I gave you my daughter, I can take her away…"

"All right, you two…" Cate found herself playing mediator again. In the five years since Paul's surgery and her father moving in, things had been turbulent but manageable. Her father was staying in the basement bedroom and C.J. was in Rory's old room while the boy was off attending Michigan State. Kerry was in her fifth year of law college and working as a junior law assistant for MacNichol, Bellows and Flockhart where she was specializing in criminal law, sort of following Bridget into the crime-fighting business to a lesser agree. Rory was on a basketball scholarship without a major. He was into paranormal research after meeting writer William Collins, an acquaintance of his parents, but he couldn't take the science or the history. He had tried drama, but he couldn't remember lines then dabbled through physical fitness only next deciding he wanted to be a cop and then a comedian. In another month, he'd possibly want to be something else. After scolding her father, Cate took the local news part of the newspaper, which he had already set aside. Setting it under her arm secretly, she turned to Paul preparing a plate for her from the dishes he picked up at the local Worsham's Restaurant.

"Paul…" Cate whispered over the counter. "Did you see this?" She slid the neatly folded newspaper about the Taylor Swift concert over to her husband.

"Yeah, did you see this one?" He slid toward her a copy of the New York Times. In a page-five article at the bottom corner of the page was the headline, "Mystery Blonde Busts Drug Ring." A brief perusal of the story told how a team of drug smugglers who had eluded the state police for seven years were discovered in Hudson Harbor atop their sunken craft. In prison, they claimed that one single girl in a red cape had wrecked their boat barehanded, dropping five million dollars of street value cocaine to the bottom of the bay near Bayonne. Cate turned her head up to Paul; he was grinning ear-to-ear.

"That's my girl." He shined secretly.

"She's my daughter too."

"Well, there's no mutants on my side of the family." Paul lowered his voice to hide their conversation from his father-in-law. Cate made a face back at him.

"So…" He gave Cate her dinner at the counter. "How did your day go? Any more…" He wafted his hands around her to suggest her hallucinations of Bridget around her. They had begun during his stay in the hospital after his heart surgery. She had seen Bridget in the hospital parking lot, in the grocery store and in the shower at home. It was when Cate had the mental breakdown after seeing Bridget at school that she had to go into therapy, but she was doing much better now.

"No, Paul…" Cate looked at him. "I haven't…."

Paul leaned over the counter top close enough to kiss her as she ate her meatloaf and rice.

"Why do you think that you get to see her, but I don't?" Their eyes met over the plate.

"Because…" Cate looked into her husband's vibrant blue eyes. "I'm her mother." There was a sound to her right and the happy couple looked over to the back door to the garage and the backdoor. Something dinged the outside screen door and pushed its way inward. A waft of long reddish auburn hair, the shade of an expensive burgundy jacket, and Kerry slipped into the house with paper work and a folded newspaper curled up in her left arm and the doorknob in her right hand. She had blossomed into a beautiful young lady. Her light mascara brought her blue eyes to life, and her hairstyle established her as a career woman. She turned on her right foot, looked to her parents and settled her paperwork to the counter. Her mother looked to her with a big beaming grin, but her father stood up straight and shined at his daughter the future lawyer.

"Still bringing home, homework, Care Bear…" He tried to make her smile.

"I've got studying to do, plus I'm helping Miss Flockhart in some backed up paper work." The twenty-four year old law student responded tiredly. "She also asked me to sit third chair in a liability case."

"Kerry, aren't you hungry." Cate reacted with loving concern for her daughter.

"I got something at the diner." Kerry turned away grabbing up her files and started to head upstairs, but she drifted from her course briefly to kiss her grandfather on the head. Paul and Cate shared a secret furtive moment between themselves. Since Bridget had vanished five years ago, Kerry had become quiet and withdrawn. She had skipped meals at times before, but now it was becoming obvious that they had not seen her eat in quite a while. However, she was not losing weight, so she was not going without eating. She just wasn't eating with the family if but rarely and at those times under forced personal restraint. Psychologically, they weren't sure what it meant, but it seemed she was unconsciously waiting for her sister to come home.

"Kerry, look…" Cate fetched the newspapers and brought them over to Kerry. "New articles of you-know-who…"

"I already got copies." Kerry jostled the newspapers in her newspaper. "Excuse me…" She turned vanishing up the back stairway. Cate looked back to Paul exasperated. From his chair, her father looked over and reared himself up to come into the kitchen.

"That girl is working too hard, Cate." He braced himself on his cane. "Another thing, when was the last time she ate at home?"

"I know, dad…"

"You know what I think…."

"Do tell us, Ed…" Paul prepared his father-in-law a plate with a helping dose of cooked cabbage.

"I think she'd eat more at home if you were here more." Jim slid into one of the stools. "I mean… all Paul can do is bring home restaurant food."

"Hey…" The offended father posed a bit in disbelief. "I cooked last week."

"That was your cooking?" Jim acted as if he had gas. "No wonder I had that dream I was back to eating Army rations…"

Upstairs in her old bedroom, Kerry lightly sighed and placed her papers and folders on her desk. Removing her jacket, she turned to hang it in her closet. Some of Bridget's old clothes were still in it; some of it her grandmother on her last visit had secretly packed away in the attic. Turning round to her sister's old bed, she looked at it cleaned and primped neatly once again. Her mother had freshened the blankets on it again. It often went weeks without someone sleeping on it, but sometimes her grandmother or Aunt Maggie stayed with them and slept on it. Sometimes at night, Kerry woke up and looked over and thought she saw her sister sleeping on it again, but she'd turn on the lights and the dream would be gone. Kneeling toward the base board, she pulled out two large albums from under the bed, both were about the same size, the thicker one closer to green than the other, which was faded and frayed. Setting the older one on her bed, she spread the second more recent one out on her desk. It was her scrapbook for the last few years since her sister had vanished. The edges of newspaper articles extended from its pages. Taking the scissors from their place, she unwrapped her copy of the New York Times first to clip out the article about the mystery blonde. Snipping it from the rest of the paper along imaginary lines, she next turned to the article from the local Detroit Tribune, which was just a bit bigger than the first by a half-inch. Once she had both articles, Kerry unfurled the album across her desk. Over two years of stories both taped and loose filled the first thirty pages. Stories ranged from New York City to Seattle and from San Diego to Jupiter, Florida and abroad. Drug runners terrified by a girl who bent automatic weapons, terrorist street gangs thrown into dumpsters flipped over on top of them, serial killers found hanging from electrical wires, flood victims from Nashville carried aloft by blonde spirits in blue costumes, abducted children who fell in love with red-caped angels… the stories were just as abroad the criminal spectrum as they were across the globe. There was the occasional blurry photo, the familiar blonde girl suspend in the air, the cryptological articles debating the existence of a supposed blonde girl posing as the comic book character. After all this time, the rumor was still persisted that they were all promotional stunts for a movie in progress, but both DC Comics and Warner Brothers denied that. What movie could afford to create thousands of these stunts with normal people across the globe? Things became truly bizarre when Discovery Channel's Mythbusters became involved to bust the sightings. Their female co-star was slid pulled aloft on lines to fake the flights, they used explosives to flip the cars and they showed what it took to bend an automatic rifle in a car crusher, but all they could do was confirm they were just as mystified by the absence of regular special effects. Kerry, meanwhile, knew the truth, and she kept it secret even as she grieved the loss of her sister. Pulling off a few more inches of tape, she went to tape in the other article.

"Hi, Care-Bear…" Cate helped hold the article down as Kerry taped it down to the page. "I brought you a snack." She placed down a meatloaf sandwich with a glass of juice. "You're thinking of Bridget, aren't you?"

"Kind of hard not to when she shows up in the newspaper." Kerry sounded snotty and annoyed. "I mean… we can go months not hearing anything from her, but then she gets reported in Jamaica or Australia or Japan, and… Mom, how hard could it be to come home once in five years between having bullets bouncing off her chest or…" She looked at the new clipping in her scrapbook. "Dropping a 747 in the middle of a Taylor Swift concert?"

"Well, like your father says, she's busy…"

"Mom, she can't **possibly** be that busy!" Kerry rose from her desk, her attractive features stressed and overwhelmed by pangs of regret and misdirected angst. "I think I finally figured what's going on. After living here and denying that she was "that girl," she refuses to come home so I can bust her. She knows I saw her. She knows I got proof, and she…. Won't come home because she won't let me have the last word."

"Kerry…" Cate stood and lightly shook her head in denial. "I don't think your sister is that devious."

"Yes, she is…" Kerry slapped her scrapbook together and tossed it over the other one to slide back under the spare bed. "She was devious enough to hide her secret from me while she was still living here. She refused to share her secret with me, and she still refuses to share it."

"Then why collect the newspaper articles." Cate asked.

"Because…" Kerry tried to be angry, but couldn't fake it. "She's my sister!" Her eyes filled with tears and she reverted back to a little girl, holding her arms out and turning to hug her mother. All Cate could do was embrace her daughter and try to squeeze the bad feelings out of her. Swaying a bit over this moment, her eyes looked up and caught the framed photo of Kerry and Bridget together on the wall when they were still sisters who loved each other and shared the same room.


	3. Chapter 3

3

Morning broke and the California Bureau of Investigation was called by the Pasadena police to an ugly scene at 1465 Crestview on the North side. It was an affluent neighborhood for celebrities, business characters and career people. Each house looked as if it was built from a near perfect mold of the last house. In the house, Amanda Beard the housekeeper had just discovered her employer, businessman Charles Switzer, laid out against the dining table with a bullet through the back of his head and the impact sprayed across the white table cloth. It looked like a mob hit, but that was an unsure conclusion to jump to at this time. Forensics perused the scene inch by inch, police detectives interviewed Mrs. Beard and the grieving widow. Sergeant Teresa Lisbon was the brunette blue-eyed beauty in charge of the investigation. Kimball Cho was her associate. The straight-faced Asian American turned from processing the evidence to give her the details.

"Looks like a through-and-through…" He remarked. "Found the point of impact the bullet took, but the killer must have taken it with him."

"To make it hard to trace." Lisbon mumbled. "Where's Jane?" She looked around slightly annoyed.

"At the curb…" Cho pointed briefly with his pen. A slight sigh, Lisbon turned aggravatedly and strolled out of the front door of the house and down the front steps to the surrounding wall of the property. Over the top of it, she noticed Patrick Jane standing and waiting at curbside as if he was smoking a cigarette, but he wasn't a smoker. He was a recurring pain in her side she respected and sometimes struggled to accept. He turned up his gaze to her, his waft of blonde hair bouncing on his brow as he grinned, postured and stood waiting.

"Isn't this when you look at the crime scene, figure out who did it and then annoyingly do things your way while frustrating me in the process?" She responded condescending to him.

"Is that what I do?" He appeared generally confused then flashed his smile and looked back up and down the street. "Oh, I've got my suspicions… but I'm not doing it now." He paused for another look up and down the street. "The killer's on his way back to the crime scene."

"He is?" Lisbon tried to believe him but she was skeptical. "How will I recognize him?"

"Oh…" Jane was irritatingly smug. "You'll know him… You may want to step back a bit from the curb."

"Oh, I should? Is it because…" There was a sudden loud crash and a silver Mercedes Benz suddenly appeared out of nowhere. The impact of hitting the ground drove all four wheels into their tire wells, and popped the hood and trunk open, from one end the engine was pushed up through the bottom and from the other end luggage vomited on to the street. Lisbon just lightly shrieked and jumped back from the sudden fright. From within the totaled vehicle, its hysterical and terrified driver achingly crawled up from the floor of the car. A minute ago, he was on the way to the airport with a plane ticket for Jamaica, and now Philip A. Hutchinson was back in front of the home of his business partner, the man he had killed. Jane just grinned ear to ear to Lisbon and arched his head backward over the house.

"She's special, isn't she?" He spoke about the tiny red blur hurrying away over northern Pasadena toward the business district and past Cal Tech for the residential district. From her advantage, Bridget could see the Los Angeles sky line and just beyond her right hand the mountains around Mount Lee and the Hollywood sign. Wafted by these high breezes, she brought her right hand forward to keep her flight and drew in her left hand to check her watch. Even without it, she could tell it was getting late. Sunset was peeking over the Atlantic just three hours away from her height, and upon recognizing the block around her apartment on North Los Robles at this height, she dove upward into this ocean of air and then dived downward, her long blonde locks getting pulled back behind her by the thrust of her trajectory. Her apartment building was veering upward to her faster and faster, becoming more than just a dot in her eye line and swelling outward to full-size. A slight dodge and she swooped behind the building and around to the front to enter through her front bay windows… barely seen she hoped. Her head dipped up and her feet reached down to touch floor, some of her momentum carrying her steps forward into her small kitchen. She opened her refrigerator and took out a bottle of water to drink, her free hand tugging off her cape and tossing it aside over a chair. Barely covering it, it instead flittered and fell to the floor. A slight sigh, Bridget sipped her water and sat at her sofa to remove her red boots.

She liked this place. It wasn't terribly expensive, but it was humble… It was a third floor one-bedroom apartment of a Pasadena walk-up. The elevator didn't work, but she didn't mind. She had a much cozier apartment than when she was living under the name of Linda Kent in New York City, but that one was too big for her. It was bigger, larger and had a nicer view, but this one was more manageable, a bit closer to the room she briefly had at the Hotel Tipton in Boston. The only reason she gave up the Manhattan apartment was that she grew bored with it. It was too impersonal and the building staff was not as friendly as she had it when she was Chloe Tisdale at the Tipton. At the Boston hotel, she became friends with the candy girl, the maintenance man and the lounge singer, but the hotel manager was always hovering too close and trying to impress her. She was scared he was going to learn her secret identity. In fact, she was not too sure that Carey's two boys hadn't figured it out. By then, Bridget had become friends with three white witches in San Francisco, and she went to stay with them and develop and train in her powers through them. Along the way, she picked up her fourth identity, Billie Halliwell, since she had left home in Detroit. Staying in their attic, she would have stayed with them except Piper and her husband was having a baby, and she got pressed out of the place. Prue Halliwell then helped Bridget find this apartment and with that came Bridget's fifth alias since leaving Detroit and her family. Small, comfortable and cozy, this Pasadena place was her favorite place by far. She was friends with the guys from across from the hall, but instead of knowing her as Bridget, Linda, Billie or Chloe, they knew her instead as…

"Penny…" Someone was knocking alongside with the queries. "Penny…" They knocked again. "Penny…."

"Crap…" Bridget rolled her eyes to the door annoyingly. Swearing under breath, she tugged off her red boots, dropped them behind her sofa out of view and pulled her bathrobe up off the top of her laundry basket in the chair to cover up her costume. For all intents and purposes, the tall neurotic from Cal Tech who lived across the hall from her believed she was a struggling actress. He had no inkling of her secret identity, her eight million dollars fortune or even of her past. In the past, she had convinced the frustrating nut she was a former farm girl from Nebraska instead of a costumed crime fighter from Michigan. Pulling her robe up over her costume to appear ready for the shower, she sighed annoyingly and jerked open her door already aggravated.

"Yes, Sheldon…" Bridget wanted to yank his underwear up over his head. She could do it too.

"Penny," The arrogant physicist looked her with two analytic brown eyes capped by a tightly cropped crown of brown hair. "I have a bit of a little conundrum with you."

"What is it this time?"

"Look at this…" Sheldon whipped out his white Flash shirt. "What do you see?"

"A white shirt."

"White…" Sheldon chortled under breath as if he was hiccupping slowly to keep a breath. "Not exactly…" He paused obnoxiously. "Penny, when Leonard blindly asked you to wash a few of our things in your laundry, I was under the assumption that you knew what you were doing. Imagine my surprise when I get my shirt back and noticed that in the color spectrum of hues that my once white shirt had once been had gone from a perfect FFFFFF color scheme to a hideous mockery at FFFFFG. You ruined my Flash t-shirt!"

"Sheldon…" Bridget pinned her nose as if she had a headache and clutched her robe shut with her other hand. "I can't tell the difference."

"But I can!"

"But no one else can!"

"But I can, and I'm the one who demands compensation." He fidgeted a bit completely ignorant of the human condition. "I want a new t-shirt." He requested. Bridget just sighed frustratingly annoyed.

"Sheldon…" Bridget tried to restrain her nearly immortal strength. "Has anyone ever pulled your underwear up over your head?"

"That's anatomically impossible…" Sheldon acquiesced. As struggling actress Penny Parker from Omaha, Nebraska, Bridget stood in her door smiling and picturing it.

"But somehow I believe you can do it." Sheldon finally responded. "Will you replace my t-shirt?"

"Whatever…" Bridget stepped back, her left hand holding her robe closed against her costume hidden underneath and annoyingly slammed the door shut behind her.


	4. Chapter 4

4

Hunched over his computer like a mad scientist, a fitting description to the genius-level physicist if there ever was one, Sheldon typed almost a three hundred words a minute at his laptop as a man possessed. Long drawn out scientific equations flowed from his fingertips like water from his brain to the monitor through his mind. To the normal man, they were meaningless jargon for the origins of the universe, Advanced Einstein physics to the Nth degree and formulae to explain everything from gravity to molecular attraction. Nothing could quell his attention at this moment except maybe his body desiring substance. A rustle of a doorknob, the sliding of a latch and his roommate and colleague Leonard Hofstadter returned carrying carryout from the Chinese restaurant down the block.

"What did you do to Penny?" He stood there at the door under the muss of curly brown hair, thick glasses and that defeated state of existence. His voice was annoyed and frustrated. It was almost always like that in this apartment.

"I don't understand the question." Sheldon extended his had as if he was baby bird looking out from the nest for the first time. "Do you mean my confrontation about my ruined t-shirt?" He stood and strided over casually to eat at his spot on the sofa.

"I asked you not to bother her with it." Leonard responded both embarrassed and annoyed.

"Exactly, I acknowledged your request…" Sheldon stood and paused for this discussion. "But the damage was done, and I considered it prudent to bring it up in case she ever does laundry for us again."

"But I didn't want you annoying her with it!" Leonard tried to re-emphasize his point.

"Oh…" Sheldon finally got the point. "Well, then you should really have made your point more clearly." He took the takeout bag from Leonard. "Honestly, Leonard, if you really desire to reach a state of coitus with this girl, you are really making a hard effort at it. I mean… there should be a much easier way to do it."

Leonard could only posture and grimace silently in his pained embarrassed torture. Living with Sheldon was like living with a former psychopathic android programmed especially to drive him crazy. The nut had no understanding of the human condition much less personal boundaries or decorum. None of those human traits had been programmed into him, and if they ever had, that cold analytical brain of his must have erased them as illogical outdated beliefs he didn't think he was required to know in society.

"Whatever…." He stood in disbelief. "Here's you new stinking t-shirt from Penny!" He tossed his extra package at Sheldon trying to bounce it off his head like Penny had bounced it off his. Catching it out of the air, Sheldon grinned like a demented little boy and peeled back the protective wrap, sniffing the interior.

"Ah… I love new t-shirt smell…" He grinned, started to turn away then stepped back. "I wonder how she got it so fast. You know, you can order these from New York City."

"Who cares?" Leonard grimaced and set out the five containers and drinks. The other plates were for his friends Howard and Rajesh, colleagues from Cal Tech, and Penny, should she decide to come by after her encounter with Sheldon. Behind him, the two entered the apartment without casual introduction as usual. They appeared in high spirits. Clad in a blue shirt and tight dark pants, Howard was bursting with significant news and Raj was in a hurry for him to tell it.

"Guys…" He couldn't stop grinning. "Businessman Charles Switzer was discovered murdered this morning!" He continued smiling. Raj was about to burst out laughing.

"I didn't know you found the obituaries so amusing." Leonard look back at him.

"No, not him…" Raj had stepped back a bit to remove his jacket. "It's what happened at the investigation of the murder scene."

"Yeah…" Howard took the floor. "They had no idea who had did it, but then his business partner was dropped out of the sky from twenty-five feet by a certain blonde goddess wearing a certain Kryptonian cutie's costume." He grinned exuberantly. "Do you realize what this means?"

"A short murder trial?"

"No, forget about the murder!" Howard became annoyed and followed Leonard to get forks for the food. "Don't you see? Her appearances in the area are escalating! She's got to live somewhere in the area if her appearances in the vicinity are going up."

He followed Leonard back over to the food. "I've got it all posted on my website. The figures are there. She's drifting south!"

"Maybe she's heading down to Mexico for Mardi Gras." Sheldon remarked. Admittedly, the whole current "Supergirl" phenomenon did fascinate him. He believed in extra-terrestrial life, but that was mostly because of his devotion to science fiction. He had read the article from New York City a few years back where a police sergeant revealed that the girl claimed to be the daughter of Thor and Aphrodite sent to Earth to save humanity from its own sins, but what frustrated him was that instead of the objective and scientific scrutiny of the case it deserved, Howard had devoted his attention to it through his pants. Hormones and a driven lust to want to bed her fueled his attention to the alleged girl. He was not the only one. There was numerous websites directed at solving and displaying the evidence she existed, but most of them were fueled fan boy fantasies. Some of them had photo-shopped images of every blonde female icon from Britney Spears to Taylor Swift in that familiar comic book costume. There were very rare sites along with Howard's that seemed to track and post the reputable evidence the debated girl actually existed.

"Look," Howard sat down with his choice of Chinese carryout. "I've been studying her since her first reported appearances in Detroit. In the beginning, based on an operating flight perimeter of a hundred and fifty miles, she had to have lived there because 97.3 percent of her activities occurred there. She then must have moved to New York City because Detroit dropped to 3.8 and the Big Apple jumped to 98.6. The following year, New York City dropped to 33.8, and Boston shot up to 63.5. By the following fall, Boston was down to 11 percent and San Francisco was up sixty percent. Now, if my figures are right, I'm predicting Pasadena to keep going up. I'm telling you, guys, you lives somewhere around here."

"Dude, you've got way too much time on your hands." Raj took an egg roll.

"Yeah, but…" Leonard sat eating egg foo yung. "Hasn't Los Angeles gone up by 18 percent?" He slurped up a noodle.

"Only because it's so close by." Howard stuck to her beliefs.

"Hi guys…" Bridget stuck her head in the door looking for the food. The guys always shared what they had with her as long as she paid her seven dollars for her share. They'd been doing it since she had moved into her apartment in September of 2007. Trying to ignore Sheldon, she became struggling actress Penny Parker once more and pulled the computer chair over to spend the time with the guys. Sitting across from Raj, who drew quiet in her presence, Bridget reached down to partake in the meal.

"So…" She chose the shrimp and rice first. "What science fiction movie thing are we discussing this time?"

"Supergirl…" Leonard announced between bites. "The real one…"

"Oh, her again…." Bridget mused secretly. She always got a kick about hearing what they were saying about her. "What did she do this time?" She sat back pretending to be oblivious.

"She caught a murderer over on the North side…" Howard revealed over his dish. "Man, I would do anything to meet her, but NASA won't let me hack into their systems to track her flight patterns."

"Good for them…" Bridget ate a small shrimp in sweet-and-sour sauce.

"Penny, I've been meaning to ask…" Leonard spoke up. "You know, Sheldon thinks she's an evolutionary mutant, Raj thinks she's the daughter of ancient former deties and Howard's views are a bit x-rated…." He paused a minute to clear his mouth. "You've never told us what you think she is."

"Well…" Bridget found herself on the spot. "Uh… What do you think she is?"

"Personally, I think she's got to be something extra-dimensional…" Leonard looked down to look for more of the moo goo gui pan. "Maybe from another alternate reality where comic book-like characters actually exist and she just sort of got… trapped here."

"Honestly, Leonard, alternate realities?" Sheldon's pomposity spoke up. He knew he was a genius; the bad news was that he thought he was superior to everyone else. Everyone stopped and looked at him in stunned silence. He paused, ate a piece of shrimp and lifted his head again. "Do you really believe there could possibly be alternate worlds tangential to our own?"

"Einstein suggested it." Howard spoke up. In Bridget's presence, Raj could barely speak out loud unless he had alcohol to loosen his free will.

"Only by the loosest interpretation of his work." Sheldon disapprovingly shook his head condescendingly. "Dimensional beings? Demigods? Penny, do you want to know who she really is?"

"Oh, I don't know, …" Bridget lightly stirred her ingredients. "I never really thought about it. I guess I just figured she was a regular girl with extraordinary gifts. You know… like psychics and those guys who bend spoons with the power of their mind."

Sheldon made his odd chortling noise in trying to laugh. He was always amused by Penny's belief in the paranormal.

"Psychics…" He mumbled flippantly at the topic. "Penny, once again, you are vastly uninformed and I must correct you." He paused for the short breath that started his long tirades as the guys groaned in advance. "This girl is obviously a human mutant, someone exhibiting the prowess and abilities from the next evolutionary rung of human evolution…"

Bridget looked around in disbelief toward the other guys who had heard this rant before.

"Like myself…" Sheldon continued as Leonard reacted in embarrassed disbelief. "Whereas my abilities have increased my brain's ability to store and more intuitively process mathematical and scientific data, her attributes are more physical and possibly mental as per her ability to fly. Therefore, her future chances to successfully propagate progeny along her lines without regressing backward along the evolutionary scale, she would have to find a mate who is equal to herself in human evolution. Of course, as her only real peer on this planet, that would be me."

Upon hearing that, Bridget suddenly felt her stomach heave and its contents burning their way up to her throat. Her mouth over her lips, she rushed over to the guy's kitchen sink and lowered her head just as the Chinese food came pouring out of her mouth. The mere image of her and Sheldon… she did not want that image in her head. Leonard lifted his head confused, and Howard and Raj shared looks at each other.

"Was it something I said?" Sheldon remarked and checked the kung pow chicken.

"Penny…" Leonard set his plate aside and came up to check on her. "Penny, are you okay?" He handed her a towel.

"Yeah…" Bridget washed and wiped her mouth. "Something just went down the wrong pipe." She was going to have nightmares for weeks if not months. Sipping some water from a cup, she tried to recompose herself. "I haven't felt this nauseous in years."

"You know," Sheldon turned around. "You could be menopausal. How often do you ovulate?"

Leonard spun around in shock with his embarrassed hand to his head as if he was trying to hide behind it. Was there anything sacred to Sheldon? Did he have to ask that out loud? Bridget just looked at him with her eyes narrowed in disgust and her head shaking slowly in disbelief. If she did not like Leonard so much, she'd never come over here. It seemed as if Sheldon was constantly trying to top his last flippantly embarrassing question.

"I'm going back to my place to lie down." Bridget started heading to her apartment. "And gargle…." Howard popped up from his sat and started to say something.

"No, you are not coming with me!" She yelled at him.

"I wasn't going to say that." Howard reacted slightly offended. "I was just being a gentleman."

"Whatever!" Bridget opened the door and headed out with her right hand to her abdomen. Her chest was burning from the stomach acid in her esophagus, but it was taking a while to go away. She needed bicarbonate to settle her nerves. As she turned through the doorway to her third floor apartment, her senses suddenly increased. Through all the sounds and incidents her higher brain functions and subconscious filtered through, she was becoming aware of an incident. Shots were fired somewhere in the range of her clairvoyance. There was a police chase on the Los Angeles freeway, and someone was going to get hurt unless she did something.

"Great…." She burped up some gas. "I hope I don't vomit over someone…"


	5. Chapter 5

5

"Hey, Aunt Cate…" CJ Barnes entered the Hennessey house in Detroit. A blonde, smart-mouthed former Army private, the skinny thirty-something was the son of Cate's sister, Maggie. He had come to stay with his Uncle Paul as support after Paul's heart surgery in 2003, and he had stayed on while Cate was in therapy after Bridget's disappearance. Nowadays, he worked as a history teacher at his cousins' old high school and lived in Rory's old room while the boy was in college. Dressed in a blue shirt and tan pants, the acerbic former problem child wandered in carrying the mail from the mailbox at the curb. Cate paused for a breath and set the laundry basket down on the sofa.

"Mom sent a letter…" He paused looking annoyed. "…to you." He pulled the letter from Cate. "I didn't get one. I mean… my god… the woman's my mother."

"She still loves you." Cate told him and took the letter.

"Why can't she write me once in a while?" CJ looked to Cate and around the room.

"Your mother isn't much of a letter writer, CJ." Cate sat down started sorting the laundry out on the sofa and coffee table. "As it is, she barely writes me as it is." She paused pulling apart her father's underwear from Paul's. "What else is in the mail?"

"Junk mail…" CJ sorted through the letters and tossed them down by his aunt, but he held one up to the light to try and see through it. "Well, what do you know? A letter from Bridget."

Cate jumped up hurriedly and jerked the letter from him.

"For Bridget!" CJ corrected himself. "For Bridget!" It was just a college application from people who were unaware she was no longer living at home and had just assumed she had finished high school.

"That's not funny, CJ!" Cate swatted him and left the laundry for the moment for a drink in the kitchen.

"I'm sorry…" He sounded legitimately sorry. "I know how much it bothers you." He paused and stood at the counter top playing it as if it were the keys of a piano. "You know, I've been meaning to tell you. One of my Army buddies works in the FBI; I could ask him to look into her case."

"What?" Cate had pulled a bottle of water from the refrigerator and had lowered it after a sip to consider the opportunity. She so wanted her daughter home, but if there were a chance she could lose her again by the FBI finding out who she was, she would rather share her secretly with the world than risk the secret. "Uh, no…" She returned to work with the laundry.

"Why not?" CJ sensed something else in her apprehension. "You're always talking about how much you miss her, last Thanksgiving you place a spot for her – just in case… Come on, the guys good. He worked once with Jason Gideon…"

Cate had no idea who that was.

"Gideon's a criminal profiler. He's really good in tracking down serial killers."

"You think Bridget is a serial killer?" Cate looked up to CJ a bit offended by that thought.

"Well, not a very good one…." CJ chuckled. "But they're very good in finding people."

"I don't think so, CJ."

"Aunt Cate…" CJ slid around and sidled up against the arm of the sofa to press her for details. "Why not? What are you not telling me?" He looked at her and tried reading her. Cate looked at him in disbelief and folded a towel. CJ put his hands to his head like a radar unit trying to read her mind then gasped suddenly and placed his fingertips to his mouth in stunned surprise as if he was shocked. He grinned slyly.

"You got a secret…. You got a secret…"

"CJ…" Cate warned him. "Stop it."

"Let's see if I can guess what it is…" CJ stood and tried applying his deductive reasoning to the case. "What do I know here? The last time anyone saw Bridget was September 2003…" He stood and paced around in full view of Cate. "It was the party for the Detroit Tribune at the Lion's Club Banquet Hall near Sterling Heights… It was the night Uncle Paul keeled over from the rip in his heart…" He looked at Cate again. "Did Bridget have anything to do with Uncle Paul's heart attack?"

"No…." Cate folded Kerry's blouse.

"Of course, she wasn't…." CJ continued thinking back. "Because I recall Kerry distinctly saying Bridget wasn't at the hospital that night. The reason she wasn't there was because she had left the banquet early." He paused thinking about that. "The food must have been incredible that night. Why would she have left early?"

"Because Bridget and Kerry were fighting that night, and Paul and I didn't want her embarrassing us in front of Miss Kent." Cate mentioned that in safe assurance that CJ could not get anything from it.

"Why were they fighting?"

"They're sisters. They were ALWAYS fighting!" Cate folded more towels. If there was anything she had learned from her daughters, it was to simplify the answer and leave out the details. Back then, Bridget was doing everything she could to confuse her sister from the truth and she was VERY good at it.

"Hmmmm…." CJ was trying to think of what had happened next that night. Did Paul kill Bridget then have the heart attack? No, there were over a hundred people that night. They would have noticed that. Could his Aunt Cate have killed Bridget then faked the disappearance? Could anyone have killed Bridget? It was entirely possible. When Bridget left the banquet, she never made it home. She had just dropped off the planet.

"I got nothing." He confessed. His head turned to Cate and he sat looking at her for several seconds.

"Puh-leeze, let me in on the secret!" He begged.

"CJ !" Cate scoffed and picked up the dishtowels to take to their drawer in the kitchen. "There's no secret!"

"Catey…." Coming through the front door, Jim Eagan came strolling into the house with his cane. "Is there anything to eat? I'm starving."

"I'll make you a sandwich." Cate looked to him and turned to make it.

"Can you add a bowl of soup and some crackers?" Jim eased his tired bones into the chair and set aside his cane for the newspaper on the coffee table. Above the front page, he noticed CJ looking at him matter-of-factly. He was going to say something. He just knew it.

"Grandpappy…" CJ tried to act like a kid again. "What's the family secret?"

Cate looked up from spreading mayonnaise on some bread.

"You want a secret…" Jim lowered the front page and looked at his eldest grandson. "I hate your guts. Is that big enough a secret for you?"

"I know that one." CJ sounded defeated as if he knew that one. "Come on, I mean the one about Bridget."

"About Bridget?" That struck a nerve in the old man. "Cate…" He turned round to his daughter. "Is there something about that girl you have yet to tell me?"

Cate groaned loudly from the interrogation. Where was Kerry when she needed her? At that moment, the girl was in the law offices of MacNichol, Bellows and Flockhart at the Ritter Building down town. Between law classes at the University of Detroit and her internship, she was kept very busy doing the foot work and paper research of the firm's lawyers, but the best thing about her job was that Elaine Flockhart, her mentor, took her on business lunches to all the most expensive bistros and restaurants in town. At times, she was allowed privileges such as pedicures and health club discounts. If she stayed at it long enough, she could eventually pass the bar and begin making the serious money for her own apartment away from home, but with the job was the access to state and legal records she could use in tracking down her sister wherever she could be in the world. She just had to be careful on how she did it.

"Kerry…" Elaine was a beautiful blonde and shapely lawyer. In her youth, she was a cheerleader and prom queen, but today, she resembled actress Michelle Pfeiffer in a matching skirt jacket combo. "Did you check those dispositions for the Kyle case tomorrow?"

"Yes, ma'am…" The younger lady responded. "I finished them this morning before lunch. I've got them ready for your signature."

"Good girl…" The Nordic beauty took the file from her youngling and perused it through her glasses held at length. A few seconds of that, she held both her spectacles and the file down to turn to the young lady. "You're doing well here. Have you thought about where you'll practice when you pass the bar?"

"I thought I'd work here."

"Kerry, honey…" Elaine crossed past the desks of two interns for the open coffee area and took a cup to pour her afternoon caffeine fix. "One rarely gets to practice where they do their internship." She broke open her packet of cream and poured it to her cup. "I'm sure there will be several firms clamoring to have you when you're ready." She sipped her coffee. "Can you pull the Hastings file for me?"

"Yes, ma'am." Kerry looked up reflectively and accepted that thought. Crossing the law office for the rows of filing cabinets along the wall, she perused the few labeled by year and read the alphabet after that until she got to "H." The firm could do much with a computerized system, but they were still in that awkward interim of converting to paperless. As she looked down and across the filing cabinet, her eyes just happened to pan up to the Benjamin Franklin engraving on the wall above her. The light coming through the big windows behind her illuminated them and made the glass reflect everything through the room. When Kerry looked into the reflection, she usually caught sight of the McNamara Federal Building's reflection in the distance, but today, someone was blocking the view. Less than twenty feet off the structure floating outside the fifth floor, Bridget was floating in the air outside the building dressed in the comic book colors of red, blue and yellow with that big "S" across her chest. She was checking up on her. Their eyes locked on each other in the glass, but by time Kerry spun around, Bridget had vanished!

"Kerry…" Elaine watched the attractive redhead tearing through the firm and out into the main hall. "Where are you going?" Kerry hit the stairs hard and raced against them as hard as she could. Charging past Human Services on the Sixth Floor, she turned for the back of the building and pushed against the doors for the open back veranda connecting the building to the Hampton, the sixth floor restaurant in the Roosevelt Hotel next door. Once outside, Kerry was hit by the winds off the roof and the faraway scent of dishes prepared by the high-rated eatery. She spun round scanning the skies then hurriedly took to the ledge to look round for her sister. There was no sign of her.

"Bridget…" Kerry felt the tears coming. "Why are you avoiding me?" She looked over and around panning the skies for her lost sister.


	6. Chapter 6

6

Police detective Mac Taylor entered the fifth floor forensics of the New York City Police Department. His mind was buried in the file of Carl Anthony Tuttle, a former street thug now turned professional criminal. A few days ago, Tuttle had robbed the MacIntyre Bar And Grill over on Decatur of $375 and escaped after shooting two of the employees and locking the rest in the cooler. The week before, he was the Allegheny Restaurant as it was closing it up, killing a busboy and mortally wounding an expectant waitress. The creep was on a crime spree to fuel his disgusting drug habit and more people were going to lose their lives of they couldn't track him down and put him back in prison. Forensics expert Danny Messer was still trying to pin down a location for the grave moss off Tuttle's shoes from the last location, but in the interim, he had turned back to the warped semi-automatic picked up from off Lower Broadway where a tractor trailer had been flipped and scattered across the entry to Waverly Place. The spectacle took ten million dollars of pure crack cocaine off the street and arrested seven drug-runners wanted by the Feds. It was one of the largest police incidents in the last month with every point and reference featured across the news channels and affiliates. Everything about the bust was made public…

…except the claims about the blonde girl in the red cape who turned over the Peterbuilt truck with her bare hands before flying away…

"Mac…" Messer came strolling toward Taylor. "I pulled something off that bent semi-automatic." He revealed a glass slide and placed it in the imager to appear in the main screen.

"Epithelials…" Mac recognized them. "From whom?"

"Not from any of the guys we arrested…" Danny was both mystified and intrigued. "I have been trying to get DNA from these for over an hour. They're indestructible. I've got nothing, nada, bupkis from them… Not only that, but the mystery prints, I ran them through the system. She doesn't exist."

"You really think that all those witnesses actually saw a blonde girl in a superhero costume flip that truck and toss those guys around like rag dolls?" Mac was hesitant to believe the twenty-seven reported accounts.

"Do you recall Captain O'Neil from the Twenty-Fourth precinct?" Messer pulled another file. "He not only believed this girl existed, but before he retired, he actually talked to her. She helped him take the Bench Park Rapist off the streets."

"I know Ed." Mac stood and leaned his head back briefly. "He also told me that the newspaper took artistic license with his account, but until I meet this girl myself…" He skeptically postured a bit. "It would take a grand gesture to make me believe that some bulletproof apparition is flying around flipping trucks."

"She's not an apparition." Messer tapped the machine with the epithelials. "Do you know how much force it takes to bend a semi-automatic? Over two thousand pounds per square inch. The Mythbusters proved it. That truck… it had to weigh almost fifty tons… Do you realize how powerful a girl… not a guy… a girl has to be to do what she did?"

"It's enough to boggle the imagination." Mac grinned a bit. "But… let's try to live in the real world here."

"Mac…" Lt. Don Flack entered through the glass doors from the hall. "Have you seen what's going on outside?"

"What happened?" Mac asked, but Flack just gestured and drew the seasoned officer and Messer across the room to the windows where most of everything was covered by the darkness of night. The sky was cloudy with few stars and a faint moon on the horizon, but light-filled windows, streetlights, headlights of vehicles and flashing patrol lights illuminated most of the street below them. With them, lab specialist Lindsay Monroe came ahead of the other forensic personnel gathering at the window and looking down at what was happening. There was a fire engine with lights blaring and ladder extended to something hanging off the pole out front. Detective Stella Bonasera at the scene supervised as rescue workers climbed up and tore free the two hundred pound man hung up by his underwear. It was Carl Anthony Tuttle ready to be taken in custody. Stella looked up to Mac looking down at them. Behind Mac, Danny turned away humming the theme to the "Superman" movie soundtrack.

Several blocks away off the south tip of Manhattan near Battery Park, several New Yorkers felt the pangs of pride when they saw the bright green statue of Lady Liberty off shore standing guard over the bay like the Colossus of Rhodes. Created by French sculptor Frederick Bartholdi to celebrate one hundred years of American Independence in 1874, the famous American landmark saw thousands of tourists every single day of her existence. Illusionist David Copperfield reputedly made her vanish on television, and Ray Stantz of New York Paranormal had supposedly moved her to the front of the New York Metropolitan Museum in the late Nineties. The ghosts of long dead immigrants reportedly haunted the island she rested upon. Security guard Lou Shapiro walking his route around the base tried to be wary of those spirits, but he also felt proud to be an American when he stood below Lady Liberty standing one hundred and fifty feet tall and became emboldened by her grand visage. When he looked up upon her now, he noticed something else. There was something up high between the third and fourth spikes of the crown, and it was moving. What the heck was that? Wondering if it was a bird, he shrugged it away and continued on his rounds.

Up high two hundred and fifty feet off the ground, Bridget sat on Lady Liberty's crown and watched the guard patrolling the island. By her side, she picked up her Subway club sandwich and took a bite of it then took a sip of her Diet Coke. She loved this view of Manhattan. In Chicago, she could sit and eat atop the Sears Tower, and in London, up top the roof of Big Ben. In Hollywood, it was the peak of Mount Lee over the Hollywood sign, but despite these grand views she saw, she wished she could share them with someone. During her brief respite, she took a chance to check her cell phone. Leonard had called her; she would call him later when there was not so much wind. Maddie in Boston had called her, and so had Lily and Piper. Between bites of her dinner, she took the time to scroll through the images she had saved and ran across the images of her and Kerry from back before her secret identity. She also had images of her mother and father with her and even one of Rory. She thought about calling them, she imagined their voices and surprise to hear her again. A slight tear fell down her face as she recalled her family. All these powers… all these abilities and the good she had done with them, and… she couldn't share them with anyone. Her eyes closed briefly with regret, her breaking heart pounded in her chest as she clicked her phone shut and placed it in her hip pouch. Before her, shadowy miles of Manhattan poured out before her illuminated by pinpricks of light. The moving sparkles of headlights drifted beyond the shadows of buildings. There were millions of sounds to keep her company but the one she wanted. She wondered what her sister was doing, what was her mother was eating tonight, what was her father watching on TV… but instead, she felt the breeze of the wind, the sound of boats in the harbor and the shrieks of the gulls flying over the water. Amidst all those sounds, a distant police siren broke through the noises of civilization. Her eyes turning toward them, Bridget sipped a portion of her drink quickly, stuffed the last bites of her sandwich in her mouth and grabbed her trash before diving off the Statue of Liberty, carrying it to slam-dunk a Liberty Island trash bin on her way. Gravity increased her descent to a hundred miles per hour, but her psychokinesis ricocheted her off the water surface to speed ten feet off the surface of water back toward Manhattan where her wake in the water was replaced by gusts of wind that blew away curbside trash bins and scattered newspapers. Her fists furled before her, Bridget sailed past cars under her at eighty miles an hour.

"Harry, watch it!" Prison escapee Marv Anglin sat in the front passenger seat as his buddy raced past the Waverly Place Submarine Shop, drove over a fire hydrant and sideswiped the Cash Cab in their way. Behind them, the blue and red police lights flashed and followed them from atop a police car. On the turns, Marv was pressed into the door as Harry sped through every opening trying to get to the Holland Tunnel for New Jersey. Behind them, another patrol car was lost behind a bus, but two more joined the chase.

"Come on!" Marv tried to hang on. "What's wrong with going back to prison?" He pleaded to his buddy. "We get warm beds, three square meals, a shower…" Their stolen Monte Carlo bounced over the curb, nearly ran over Sean Finnerty from Staten Island and clipped the side of George Constanza's brand new Ford Eclipse.

"There ain't no way I'm going back to prison." Harry Harvey Jr. screamed back as he jerked the wheel left to avoid a garbage truck with Mike Rowe and a film crew nearby. Harry had been a career thief since he was eleven when he shoplifted Star Trek toys and comic books. He had seen jail almost twenty times, but there was nothing he hated more than getting put there by an eight-year-old kid. "We finally got enough money to…." He dodged another car and raced through an alley over to Fourth Street with his brakes squealing. "…Get back to Chicago. " The police were trying a pit maneuver so he drove over a bicycle and over the sidewalk past a subway entrance past people scrambling out of the way.

"What's in Chicago?" Marv hung on to the strap above the door with his eyes widened upon the traffic in their way. "Wait, you mean Kevin? Kevin McAllister? That kid who got us caught the last two times? He's got to be grown up by now."

"I don't care!" Harry saw the signs directing him toward the Holland tunnel and raced ahead and around cars at a light. "I ain't going back until after I've taken him out!"

"Do you recall what he was like? He's got to be worse now!"

"Don't care!" Harry kept following the signs and turning the steering wheel to escape the police cars. "I'm taking that kid out once and for all!"

"Oh, yeah? What about her!" They looked up to the red and blue blonde who dropped down out of nowhere before them. Standing her ground, Bridget scowled, entrenched herself firmly before the stolen Monte Carlo roaring toward her at eighty-five miles an hour and caught the hood in her hands as the front grill work wrapped around her legs and brought the charging engine to an immediate stop. Following Einstein's rule of momentum, Harry and Marv flew screaming through the windshield, over the hood and past Bridget, hitting and rolling across the asphalt behind her. Just a block behind them, the police squealed to a stop at the scene. Grabbing their guns, they raced to arrest the perps sprawled out on the scene. Harry was moaning in pain, but Marv laid there with his injured back, bruised ribs and broken arm as a cacophony of police revolvers started appearing aimed at him. In the sky, the cute blonde was flying west toward the Hudson River.

"You know…" Marv groaned out loud to the surrounding officers. "I never just sit and look at the stars anymore…"


	7. Chapter 7

7

South of Pasadena on the coast was Long Beach, California at the mouth of the Los Angeles basin. It had been founded by Spanish Conquistadors and San Franciscan monks spreading their religion into the New World in 1785, but it wasn't until 1840 when it was actually became a settlement. Through the 1920s, it became an industrial port for much of Lower California. Several oil refineries dotted the skyline along with several other businesses. Dr. Stephanie Powell was a medical researcher for Global Tech, a private research facility that researched new medicines and new biochemical techniques in other fields. She lived with her family in the northern suburb of Pacific Bay with her husband and two teenage children. Returning home, she pulled her car into the driveway slowly and pulled up alongside her husband's Nissan. Placing her car in Park, she turned the engine off from the ignition as usual, her left hand responding by habit to open her driver's side door and slid her legs out as her other hand unsecured her seat belt. Her body lightly swaying as she rose, the lovely mother moved slowly and unsure as if in a trance. Instead of just swinging the door behind her, she turned to press it close with both her hands, her key ring still dangling off her small finger. Subconsciously realizing where she was, she then turned toward the house and unerringly drifted toward the house. Her mind was deep in thought as she reached up to slide open the glass patio door in her way and wander inside half aware of where she was.

"Hey, baby…" Her husband, Jim, was a police sketch artist. As she tossed her keys into the bowl near the doors, he lifted his head in love with her every time she entered his life. "How was your day?"

"Fine…" Stephanie noticed her kids doing their homework at the dinner table. "Just fine…." She mumbled distractedly, but Jim didn't believe her. Her daughter, Daphne, lifted her head up to her.

"Steph…" Jim set aside the knife he was using to chop vegetables for dinner as Stephanie paused distractedly, pulled a chair out from the counter and sat down with a disconcerted sigh. "Baby, what happened?" Jim came over to her and lovingly held her head up to him. "Did something happen?"

At that point, JJ looked up from his philosophy textbook.

"I'm not sure." Stephanie looked around confusingly.

"Mom…" Daphne had poured cold water from the refrigerator door into a glass and gave it to her mother. "Are you okay?"

"Of course, I'm okay…" Stephanie took the glass and sipped a bit of water as she slowly returned to reality.

"Do you want to talk about it?" Jim looked worried and concerned as he took her other hand and caressed it in his own.

"About it?" Stephanie started thinking back. "It's nothing really. I mean… I was driving home on the expressway…" She simulated holding the steering wheel in her hands. "I'm talking to Katie over my cell phone, and eventually I found myself backed behind a large tractor truck in front of me on the road. I started slowing down to give him clearance and make the exit, but when I started slowing down, I discovered this school bus coming up behind me…"

"You were in an accident?" Jim grew concerned. JJ stopped writing to listen. Daphne hung on her mother's every word.

"No, no accident at all!" Stephanie came out of her trance and accepted what had happened. "I had started changing lanes, but the bus driver must have been going too fast or hadn't enough time to notice me, because I came this close…" She showed an inch between her fingers. "…To getting knocked through the guard rail off the expressway."

"He missed you?" JJ guessed.

"No."

"He hit you?" Daphne's eyebrows went up worried.

"No… that's the crazy part!" Stephanie still couldn't believe it. "All of a sudden, I saw this streak of red out the corner of my eye and there was suddenly this girl in a blue costume and red cape on the expressway. She comes right between me and the bus and rides the front of it through the shoulder, around me at fifty miles an hour and drags it into the empty left side lane ahead of me." She paused looking at her family. They all looked at her in disbelief.

"Jim, this twenty-ton bus flew over the car and landed on the other side of me on the other side of the exit!" Stephanie was defiantly sure of what she had seen. "It didn't fly. This girl carried it!"

"Mom…" JJ smirked a bit holding back a cynical laugh. "Mom, did this blonde girl have a big red "S" across her chest?"

"Yes, she did!" Stephanie recalled the girl's face. "Wait a second, how did you know she was blonde?"

"Mom…" Daphne reached over for her laptop, Googled a word and opened a website. "You're not the first person to see this girl. She's like the new Sasquatch…" She turned her laptop around to reveal _Howard Wolowitz's Incredible Supergirl Sightings Database_. "Look at this… hundreds of people… mostly geeky comic book freaks… have seen her over the last five to ten years. The site has hundreds of sightings from all over the world…"

"Wow…"

"I thought she was like a ghost or something." Jim recalled one of the officers in his precinct had run into her after a gas station robbery last year. He scrolled down through the 2010 sightings back to January. "That's a lot of sightings…"

"This is impossible." Stephanie perused the site with Howard's statistics, theories, beliefs and logistics. She felt closer to reality once she realized she was not the only one to see the Kryptonian goddess. On the picture page were scans of newspaper articles from the Los Angeles area about the mystery blonde. On another page, there were photo-shopped images of everyone from actress Reese Witherspoon to entertainer Britney Spears in the red, blue and yellow costume. "Jim, there is no way for a girl to fly and carry a bus. No one gets superhuman powers."

"It looks like she did." Jim perused the sightings page back to last winter. "Wow, look at all these people." He suddenly recognized a name.

"JJ!" Everyone looked at the boy. The boy snapped to attention a bit embarrassed.

"Did I forget to tell you guys that story?" JJ recalled the girl who had saved him from a beating from high school seniors. "God, she was so hot…."

Back in Pasadena, Howard and Raj rarely missed a meal at Leonard and Sheldon's apartment. Every night was assigned to something else. Monday was reserved for Thai Food, and Tuesdays they went to the Cheesecake Factory, which Bridget pretended to work for as Penny Parker, little suspecting that as Linda Kent, she actually owned the place. Wednesdays were reserved for tacos from the Ha-Ha Hacienda even if Raj suspected their hamburger tasted a bit like horsemeat. Thursdays were at Big Boy for Sloppy Joe sandwiches, Friday was reserved for Giacomo Pizza, Saturday was Subway Sandwich Day and Sundays were the day for Captain Ahab's Seafood. It was Sheldon's strict schedule, but the guys sort of followed it. Heading to meet Leonard and Sheldon, the guys walked leisurely up the stairs to the fourth floor apartment of their associates. On the second landing, his laptop under his arm, Raj stepped a bit quicker than his best friend, and Howard was now following Raj, but a moment to hasten his step, and Howard was more secure leading the way. On the fourth floor, he would be first to reach the door and give the announcing knock. Raj rolled his eyes at this unspoken hierarchy of ascension between them and gazed back to Howard one more time before Leonard opened the door.

"Hi, guys, come on in." He waved them through. "Why are you here so early? I haven't even ordered the Chinese food yet." That was the menu for every Wednesday.

"Raj got some pictures of Priya from India." Howard spoke up.

"Dude, I wanted to be the one who told him." Raj sounded both annoyed and crest-fallen.

"Sorry... go ahead."

"My parents sent me some pictures of my little sister from her vacation in Calcutta." Raj quickly announced. "I thought I'd bring them by to show you."

"Of Priya?" Leonard grinned as Sheldon feigned interest from his computer. "Sure, I'd love to see them."

"Okay…" Raj moved to sit on the end of the sofa away from Sheldon's spot and opened his laptop. He opened his e-mail account and clicked on the message for the attachments. "Here she is… She's standing in front of the Temple of Shiva."

"She looks cute."

"Dude… that's my sister…." Raj played the over-protective older brother. He knew his sister was hot from other guys, but he did not want his friends to think of her in that way or even think of dating her.

"Sorry…"

"What's that she's holding?" Sheldon sat in his spot.

"I don't know."

"How could you not know?" Sheldon launched into another worthless observation. "As the provider and host of these images, you should be able to provide any and all details of the stories behind them."

"Dude, I'm not writing my sister's biography." Raj grew annoyed along with the other guys. "I just want to share some pictures from home."

"Then what's she holding?"

"A pound of coffee grounds, who cares!" He clicked to a picture of Priya in a light shirt sitting on the wall of a bridge near the Ganges. Leonard grinned a bit, and Howard checked out her figure as Sheldon grumbled a bit put off by Ray's sharp comment. Raj clicked to the next picture.

"Here's she is in front of our old school." He commented.

"Looks a bit run down." Leonard noticed.

"Yeah, there was a big fire several years ago." Raj explained. "They never bothered to rebuild it."

"Was that before or after that story you told us about a volcano you created?" Howard recalled how Raj described a fire he couldn't stop.

"No connection!" Raj grew disconcerted and embarrassed. "No connection at all!" He quickly went to another picture of the marketplace near the city.

"This was my grandfather's old market." He quickly moved on. "He sold it for a crap load of money to buy a hotel that later burned down."

"Did you burn that down too?" Sheldon asked.

"I never burned anything down!" Raj started screaming. "Nothing! Nothing at all! They couldn't prove it either way! Don't say stuff like that!" He reached to click to the next picture, but Leonard gazed at the surroundings in it and noticed something odd. He noticed something…. Something off…

"Wait a minute, Raj…" Leonard scowled a bit confused. "That looks like Penny in the background."

They all leaned into the laptop.

"Oh, my god…" Howard noticed the shapely Cheesecake Goddess standing sideways at a table in the background. She was fifteen to twenty feet behind Priya up front and glancing over items at a table beyond Raj's baby sister with a pack over her shoulder. "Leonard, I think you're right! I don't recall her ever saying she had visited India."

"When would she have visited India?" Sheldon was struck confused by the revelation of the picture. "She is around us almost all the time. Maybe she's a quantum reality doppelganger counterpart of our Penny visiting here from the Anti-Matter Universe?"

"Or…." Raj looked up. "Penny has a twin sister… or a twin cousin?"

"Twin cousin…" Sheldon chortled in disdain. "There's no such thing as a twin cousins. I'm almost positive my solution is the only correct one."

"Look, let's just check the time stamp of the photo." Leonard took Raj's laptop and pulled the photo into the computer programs separating Penny from the rest of the image and pulling up the computer code for the image. A few more clicking of keys and he had the date of the photo as August 18, 2009. "There you go…" He stopped. "August of last year. Where was Penny last August?"

"Here…" Howard revealed.

"Yes, but it's also the week before of Raj's birthday." Sheldon's brain processed and recalled things quicker. "Raj, what was it that Penny gave you for your birthday?"

"A Hindu camel hair blanket like I had as a kid…" Raj nervously recalled as he took back his laptop. "Remember? I said you could only find them back home."

"Exactly." Sheldon revealed. "Where was Penny all that month? Pasadena. For her to have been in India, she would had to have been missing a minimum of three days to go there, find the blanket and come home. Thereby proving I am right. That girl is not Penny; she is Penny's quantum reality doppelganger counterpart visiting here from the Anti-Matter Universe and she is hiding her from me."

"Or…." Howard could not believe he was saying this. "She was there in one day because she can fly at subsonic speed like…"

"Supergirl?" Leonard had wandered into the kitchen thinking about it. He said it and wondered about it. "No… no…" He tried to disbelieve it. "Could it be?" He grinned about it thinking a bit about it.

"Of course not…" Sheldon scoffed at the idea. "For Penny to keep such an obvious revelation from me, she would have to be smarter than me, which she is not. Penny is dumber than dirt."

"Let me get this straight…" Leonard turned to Sheldon striding into their kitchen nook. "You don't think Penny could be Supergirl just because it would mean she would have to be smarter than you."

"Of course…" Sheldon answered assuredly. "If Penny was Supergirl, I would have recognized her immediately. In fact, I have automatic recall of every purported image of Supergirl taken of her of within the last five years since she first appeared." He poured himself a drink from the refrigerator. "Disavowing all the obvious fakes, she would have to look something within a reasonable amalgamation of Reese Witherspoon, Jessica Simpson, Gwen Stefani and Katee Sackhoff."

The guys drew silently annoyed by his far-flung and conceited estimation.

"Dude, " Raj sighed a bit. "Just call her and ask her where she got my blanket…"

"Yeah…." Leonard took out his cell phone and pressed Penny's number on his speed dial. Taking it to his ear, he glanced over to Sheldon.

"Don't forget to ask her about her quantum reality doppelganger counterpart visiting here from the Anti-Matter Universe." Sheldon chimed in.

"How can I forget?"

Several hundred miles away on another continent, the girl known as Penny Parker was sitting in her favorite Chinese restaurant, the Xi Shen Ho in Beijing, China. It was a short hop for her godly powers, and she stopped and ate here almost every time she hopped the Pacific. She enjoyed the poached tofu in tomato sauce with the roasted lamb with mung bean paste and didn't cringe at all to snack on roasted grubs and crickets. A sweater and long skirt pulled over her costume, she sipped the juice of fermented peaches and heard her cell phone chirp next to her on the table. Tossing her long blonde locks aside, she flipped it open, looked at the number and held it to her ear.

"Hey, Leonard…" She greeted in good spirits and munched on a piece of roasted pig ear.

"Penny?" Leonard scowled a bit. The signal was weak and barely audible. "Where are you? I can barely hear you."

"Where am I?" Bridget started thinking. Next to her was a table of Chinese businessmen talking and laughing during a company meeting in the restaurant. "Uhhh…"

"Is that Chinese I hear in the background?" He recognized it as Howard and Raj grew excited. "Are you in Chinatown?"

"Yeah…" Penny looked around nervously. "Yeah, I guess you could say that. What's up?"

"Oh…" Leonard moved ahead. "We're having sort of a crazy discussion over whether or not you could be Supergirl."

Bridget's eyes widened in worried surprise.

"Just tell me where you got the blanket you gave Raj for his birthday so I can disprove it." Leonard continued after a glance at Raj and Howard.

"What's a blanket got to do with me being some stupid girl in a cape?"

"Raj has a photo of his sister in India with you in the background." He told her.

Groaning under her breath, Bridget slapped her hand to her forehead for not being more careful. It sounded like a bullet going off in the restaurant. She remembered that day.

"I'm not convinced it's you," Leonard continued. "But Howard is pretty convinced. Just tell me where you got the blanket."

"I got it off E-Bay…" She claimed.

"She got it off E-Bay." Leonard looked to Howard.

"Crap!" Howard acted defeatedly. "I was so sure!"

"Hey," Leonard turned round with his phone. "As long as you're in Chinatown, why don't you pick up the Chinese food?"

"Yeah, sure…" Bridget was a bit worried. "I can do that. I'll be there in about an hour." She could make that time easily.

"See you then…"

"See you…" Bridget hung up. This was not good. The guys had never any inkling of who she was. It was Detroit and Boston all over again. Back home, Kerry had come close several times to busting her secret, and in Boston, Zack and Cody Martin were constantly placing connections between her and her other identity. It got worse when Maddie Fitzpatrick became involved. Mulling over those events of the past, she began debating over moving out of Pasadena closer into Los Angeles. A few feet from her in the Chinese restaurant, her hostess came over to check on her.  
"Ni xihuan, chi le ma?" She spoke her native language  
"Shì de, wo néng you wu cān dài huí jiā ji wo de péngyou?" Bridget answered back in flawless Chinese. Because of her increased mental capacities, she had picked up twelve languages just by being immersed in the languages and cultures of several countries. She could speak German, French, Spanish, Swedish, Dutch, Italian, Greek, Hindu, Farsi, Russian, Chinese, Japanese and even Klingon because she hung around the guys so often. Picking up a take-out order from the restaurant, she paid in Chinese yuan, checked her watch for the time and pretended to wander from the restaurant.  
Stepping into the busy Beijing sidewalk, her feet turned away from the traffic, strolled down a few steps as she placed the carryout in her knapsack meant for her street clothes and pretended to window-shop the stores as the locals ignored her. What was one blonde American tourist in the country? When she was sure she wasn't being watched, Bridget suddenly dashed across the street behind a rickshaw and into an alleyway, her feet moving so fast until they were no longer touching the ground. She shot out of the other end of the alley over a private residence heading due east, miles of structures, trees and highway under vanishing to turn into miles of endless ocean and a few dotted islands in the East China Sea. At a hundred miles an hour, her sweater sleeves rode down over her elbows from the winds, and her skirt flailed and flapped against her lower legs. Without taking off her sweater to her regular costume, her long blonde locks poured and beat down over her knapsack with the food for the guys. Truthfully, the first time she started making these long ocean flights, they scared her to death – she was scared of getting lost. But after seeing whales and playing with porpoises and sailing high above ocean liners, she had grown to accept them. She had to be careful with her speed though. She could set off tidal waves at over 200 miles per hour and trigger patterns in the weather that could cause hurricanes and typhoons. She also had to fly high enough to stay off Navy Radar but low enough to not alter the weather. It wasn't even a straight line. Following the ley lines of the planet while gliding of wind currents made her bob to and fro, left and right as she grabbed and punched through every opening in the currents of air around the planet. Sometimes, she drifted a bit too far north or south and had to follow the coast to get back to Pasadena. To keep her mind busy, she tried to guess the nationality of the ships she sailed past under her on the Pacific.

"Major Tucker, sir," Sergeant Tony Ganios at Hickham Air Force Base near Honolulu, Hawaii suddenly picked up Bridget on satellite. "I'm picking up an unidentified bogey coming east in sector twelve. I'm clocking it at 187.9 miles an hour. It is not reading as any identified aircraft."

"At that speed, it's going to be very quickly off the scope." Major Frank Tucker turned to his superior, former astronaut Colonel Anthony Nelson, then spoke into his headset. "Sierra Foxtrot 10, can you get me a visual." Nelson stood at attention and observed.

"Heading to rendezvous point in Sector Fifteen." Pilot Topper Harley answered back in his F-15 jet. "Damn, this thing's fast."

"Do you have visual?"

Bridget was now in Hawaiian air space. She bobbed down low enough to check for landmarks and noticed Topper Harley in his Air Force fighter jet then elevated sharply again.

"It's a girl." Harley's voice came over communications in the Air Force Control Tower near Honolulu Bay. Major Tucker looked to Ganios with the same thought as the sergeant. It was the idea that Harley had been tipping back the bottle before his flight. The major looked back to the Colonel to get his impression, but Nelson just sighed a bit and brooded quietly.

"Sierra Foxtrot 12, can you confirm Sierra Foxtrot 10."

"Affirmative, Foxtrot Zero." Pilot Kent Gregory was now heading to catch up with Harley. "I am now to rendezvous with Foxtrot 10."

Bridget looked behind her in the skies over the Hawaiian Islands and saw Harley keeping up with her. Not sure of the range of these Air Force jets, she turned herself skyward and started climbing higher and higher to sub-orbital height over the planet. Harley turned on his reserve oxygen and stayed on her. The mist and spray condensed on her face and hair, but without air, there was not enough friction to warm it off of her. Gregory was catching up. He looked off his left wing and saw Harley at hundred yards and then the other sharply form coming straight at him, gliding over his cockpit close enough to see Bridget's blue eyes looking straight at him.

"Major, it looks… it looked like a girl." He spoke dreamily in love with that angelic face.

"Repeat, Foxtrot 12. Did say you a girl?"

Bridget bobbed down out of the clouds and quickly shot back up out of view avoiding a westward wind. She needed to pick up another eastbound wind to get some more speed, but these pilots had taken her off course. She needed to lose these guys fast before the rest of their flight team caught up with them.

"Yeah, a girl."

Colonel Nelson sighed distractedly as if he'd seen and heard enough. He had turned round and was heading back down the stairs to the third floor, pulling his cell phone from his pocket and stepping aside for a personal phone call. He speed-called his son, Major Anthony J. Nelson.

"Tony," The white-haired bespectacled former astronaut caught the boy sitting at a Honolulu eatery with his mother. "Where's your mother?'

"She's right here with me, dad." The young pilot was on reserve duty from Iraq, now on leave visiting his parents in Hawaii. His mother was a former Iraq beauty from Baghdad herself from the days the region was still part of Babylonia. A former jinni, she was now a mortal woman of mature beautiful married to the love of her life and spending time with her son. He looked over to her. "Mom, dad wants to know if you've been flying over the islands?"

"TJ, honey…" Jeannie Nelson sipped her fruit drink. "I haven't flown since…" They suddenly both had the same thought.

"Bridget!" They didn't know the girl personally, but they had whispers about her through the mystical community. She was being talked everywhere from Hogwarts to Waverly Place to the home of Tabitha Stephens in Westport, Connecticut.

"Tony…" Jeannie took her son's phone. "You tell your pilots to stop scaring that girl. She's just passing over."

"Passing over…" Nelson fretted a bit. "Jeannie, do you know this girl? Is she a jinni?"

"I'll explain her later." The long-lived enchantress tried to assay his feelings. "Just let her go."

"We're going to have to have a talk about this…"

Hundreds of miles off Oahu, Bridget was nearing the Marquesas Islands. Upon increasing her speed with the only southbound winds she could get, her skirt had been ripped off of her by the winds and what was left of her sweater was being held together by the straps of her knapsack, revealing her costume underneath and the stitching on it was coming undone in high speed. She couldn't out fly these pilots, she couldn't out maneuver them and she was trying to fight the compulsion to just start ripping the jets off their wings. Following her on radar, they followed her into the stratosphere and stayed within two hundred feet of her as she climbed higher and higher then dived down between then like rocket and vanished off their radar.

"Where'd she go?" Harley was looking around him through the clouds. "Where did she go?"

"Give it up, Topper…" Gregory was off his starboard side talking through their radios. "It was a nice try…"

"Yeah, but she was hot…"

"I wonder where she vanished…"

Down below them was the Castaways Resort founded and built by the late Thurston Howell III; it was now owned and run by his son, Thurston Howell IV, and his five remaining partners. Among them were former actress Ginger Grant, now a filmmaker in her own right, scoutmaster and survivalist Professor Roy Hinkley, retired sailor William "Buddy" Gilligan and his wife, Mary Ann, a cookbook authoress. The resort was on the same island upon which they had once lived on, and today, they always had anywhere between two hundred to three hundred guests staying in the hotel or the surrounding bungalows on the small tropical island. Largely retired and living on the money from endorsement deals he had made after the island, Gilligan left his bungalow to head to the eatery on the island to get a snack.

"Gilligan," The professor came from his laboratory on the island. "Mary Ann is looking for you."

"What does she want now?" The white-haired former first mate commiserated.

"It's not always bad, is it?"

"Let me put it like this." Gilligan sighed. "I feel like I'm working for the Skipper again."

The Professor chuckled at him as if he was a big brother. By his left side, Bridget came wandering out of the public ladies room adjusting a Hawaiian top and sari, carrying her knapsack with the Chinese takeout and her costume pushed down alongside of it and then shined a nice smile to the two mature island hosts. The two former castaways turned and watched the young beauty head off down the path to the lagoon. Even the Professor lit up a bit wishing he was a young man again, but then another thought came to him.

"You know, I'm reasonably sure I know all the guests on the island, but I know I've never seen her before." He stated.

"Well, she didn't fall out of the sky!" Gilligan headed off to look for his wife.


	8. Chapter 8

8

In Pasadena, the local police were calling the fire station so often to pull down street gang members and drug users off radio and power lines that they were debating getting one of their own trucks. The common street criminals were at a certain caste; they were strung up by their underwear and hung around the city like turkeys at Thanksgiving. The career criminals in town from other parts of the country had their underwear pulled up over their heads and were held up by their belts or tempered steel bent around them that they had to be freed with power cutters. More serious offenders… the child molesters, the would-be terrorists, the nihilists who indiscriminately killed innocents, they were found with broken bones, severe injuries, concussions and then strung up by their underwear. If this flying personage phenomenon was a hoax, there had to be a cult out there pulling off these incredible frauds and illusions. After almost ten years, no one really believed the hundreds of sightings were promotion stunts for an up-coming movie. Hundreds of people believed she was real, thousands did not, and yet, those numbers were constantly changing. When actor Dean Cain and actress Helen Slater went on TV to host the _Supergirl: Fact or Fiction_ documentary, the on-line poll showed that 48.9 of Americans believed she existed, while 47.6 percent believed she did not. The rest were undecided. Of those who believed was a struggling musician named Nick Tayback, a native from Twin Peaks, Oregon who had been eliminated from the first round of American Idol for the 2009 to 2010 season. Nowadays, he just spent his evenings on the corner of Barrymore and Second near his aunt's sandwich shop and played his guitar to people in the street.

"_Supergirl, Supergirl_…" He strummed and played his variation of a television ditty to pedestrians and tourists. "_Does everything like Superman…"_

"_Bends steel any size…_

"_Catches thieves just like flies._

"_Look out, here comes Supergirl…_

"_Is she strong? Listen, bud, she's got Kryptonian blood_." He sung and strummed his guitar as some people dropped change and a few dollars.

"_Can she fly through the air?_

"_Take a look over there…_

"_Hey there, there goes Supergirl_…." He grinned and played while singing as a few people stopped to here this version of the TV theme.

"_In the chill of night at the scene of a crime_

"_Like a streak of light, she appears just in time_." Tayback flirted with some girls who had stopped to giggle near him. "_Supergirl, Supergirl… Friendly neighborhood Supergirl,_

"Wealth and fame, she's ignored…

"_Action is her reward to her._

"_Life is a great big bang up_

"_Wherever there's a hang-up_

"_Here comes Supergirl…." _He stopped and grinned. A few more people gave him money in his guitar case, but several of the dispersed without leaving anything. Among them, two brothers named Sam and Dean Winchester had stopped, listened and looked at each other briefly before wandering the cold night street down toward their motel off the main street.

"Great. Now I'm never going to get that tune out of my head." Dean looked to his brother. "Did you learn anything at the Warner Brothers lot?"

"She's definitely not a publicity stunt." Sam answered as they neared the lights of a McDonalds. "I talked to a special effects guy in contact with most of the FX companies, none of them are working on anything close."

"Yeah…" Dean looked into the McDonalds and had a craving for a hamburger. "I'm starting to wonder if she really is the daughter of Thor and Aphrodite." He recalled the disputed interview with a New York City police detective several years prior. "But I did peruse a few of the websites out there, and they mostly agree that her sightings here in the Hollywood area have shot up…."

"Have we completely ruled out that she's not Laura Vandervoort?" Sam wondered about the former "Smallville" actress.

"She threatened to have us arrested if we showed up on the set of "V" again." Dean stopped and loitered outside the McDonalds. "She's definitely not an actress." He continued on his way down the street past tourists, locals and glowing streetlights as cars drove by them. "Actor lives are ruled by schedules… readings, rehearsals, photo shoots, they're tracked by the studios. An actress would never be able to juggle a secret identity, and if one tried, the paparazzi would definitely expose it."

"So that lets off Reese Witherspoon, Britney Spears, Emily Osment…."

"…Ashley Tisdale, Christina Applegate, Emile De Ravin, Taylor Swift and every other blonde celebrity that the tabloids have allegedly exposed…" He made quotations marks with his fingers on the word "exposed." "We need to track her down. Why? Because out of all the websites, the _Incredible Supergirl Sightings Database_ alone pinpoints her somewhere in Pasadena, and that's where we are going to center our investigation."

"And how are we going to meet her?" The brothers had walked farther and now stopped in front of a local H.G. Hills grocery store.

"Easy," Dean spoke. "You are going to stand on the top floor… no, the roof of the highest building we can get into and pretend to commit suicide." That was his plan.

"No…" Sam resisted. "No, I'm not doing that."

"She'll save you before you hit the ground!"

"Sam, I'm not doing that!"

"You have to!" Dean stood his ground. "We're not going to run into her in the street!" The door to the Hill's Store slid open wide as Bridget headed out carrying a bag of groceries. She had cans of soup and vegetables, a few TV dinners and some snacks, some fruits and vegetables along with the bread and ingredients for sandwiches. In her free hand, she carried her milk in a plastic bag and stopped before the brothers blocking the entryway.

"Excuse me?"

"Oh, sorry…" Sam stepped back and Bridget continued on to her fourth floor apartment down the street. She passed between the two brothers and headed on her way, her long blonde hair bouncing off her shoulders and cascading down her back. Her tight red shirt shaped her figure nicely, and her jeans danced a bit with every step. After a few feet, she stopped and looked back at the Winchesters mentally undressing her then continued on her way.

"Damn, she's hot." Sam turned and lowered his voice as his voice turned to steam in the night air.

"No argument there." Dean was smiling too. Bridget meanwhile walked down the head of the block and turned left at the crossing to cross Second Street and head onward to the apartment house. Passing a cell phone place, insurance company and an ATM, she checked the traffic and skipped off the curb and over to her building. A moment to check her mail, she walked past the busted elevator to ascend the staircase. She didn't tire from the walk up, but the elevator might have been convenient.

"Hello, Penny…" Howard waited for her at the stairs to the fifth floor outside her apartment.

"Hello, Howard…" Bridget rolled her eyes suspiciously, set aside her milk and reached for her keys in her purse hanging from her shoulder.

"Fancy meeting you here…"

"I live here." She had the door open. She took her milk and strided through the open door.

"I was just wondering where you said you came from." He sounded as if he was fishing for information. He stood and followed her into her space. "Omaha… That's in Nebraska. A farm state, isn't it? Sort of like Kansas." He paused theatrically. "Isn't that like where Smallville is?"

"I'm not sure…" Bridget placed her milk in the refrigerator and pretended to be obtuse as she fished for his intentions. "I've never been to Kansas. How big a town is it?"

"Smallville?" Howard was not rehearsed for this. "It's a fictional town… That's where Superman came from…"

Bridget knew where he was trying to lead to but decided to play him right back.

"Oh!" She acted surprised. "That's one of your comic book characters!"

"They're graphic novels!" Howard became frustrated. "Penny, what I'm trying to ask is… well, if I tried shooting you with a gun, where would the bullet go?"

"Out!" She pointed the way.

"What are you doing over here?" Leonard Hofstadter stood in the door.

"She's about ready to crack." Howard insisted. Leonard just groaned embarrassingly.

"I'm sorry, Penny…" He groaned from having to play peacemaker. "He's seems to have got in his head that you're…"

"You've got to be kidding me!" Bridget tossed her celery in the bottom of the crisper of her icebox and left the bag open with a few cans on the counter. "Okay, I want to see this supposed picture of me in India." She marched through her apartment pushing Howard before her. "If she doesn't look like me, I'm sticking my size seven pumps up some one's ass!" She entered the guy's apartment looking disgusted. Sheldon was at his spot on the sofa finishing off the last of the night's Chinese food. He wasn't exactly happy that Penny had gone to a separate Chinese place than Wong Foo's, but the food surprised him. It was practically authentic despite being take-out.

"Raj…" Leonard entered. "Show Penny the picture."

"Oh, sure…" Raj quickly drew quiet as he saw Penny. He smelled her shampoo, the scent of her perfume, and his hormones spiked and made it hard for him to talk. It barely allowed him to type and pull up the photo on his computer. Over his shoulder, Bridget as Penny looked over his shoulder as his laptop pulled up the file and the picture started loading. Waiting for the image to come up, she looked over to Howard as the picture quickly popped up; it was barely up a second as Bridget secretly twitched her nose, and it suddenly vanished.

"What did you do?" Howard came around and moved Raj's laptop to his lap. Raj could barely speak around Bridget. He could only gasp the same syllable in her presence.

"So, where is this picture?" Bridget asked.

"I'm getting it." Howard ran a quick diagnostic through the computer. Everything looked fine. He tried to download the picture, but he failed to locate the attachment. It was missing.

"The rest of the pictures are here…" He found the folder it was once in. "But it's not…"

"Give it here." Sheldon took his chance to prove his intelligence. "Howard, let someone who knows what he's doing pull it back up." He started typing pulling up files and programs and delving into the computer memory. "Okay, and here's…." He had it back then changed his mind. "….the problem. The laptop rejected it." He pushed Raj's laptop back to him.

"How's that possible?" Leonard reached down and tried solving the problem. "Images just don't vanish!"

The guys all turned and looked to the girl who claimed to be Penny Parker from Omaha, Nebraska.

"Uh, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no…" Bridget reacted to defend herself. "I never even touched the thing, and besides, I wanted to see it. All I got was a second's flash of… something."

"It was here!" Howard didn't understand what was happening. "It was here!" He gave up trying to find it again. "Raj, have your parents send another copy of the image." He passed the laptop back to Raj who looked up defeatedly confused.

"Penny," Leonard spoke up. "In Howard's defense, it looked a heck of a lot like you."

"Leonard, look…" Bridget shifted her weight to one leg and postured a bit. "A lot of the people who come into the Cheesecake Factory are always saying I look like daughters or nieces or grand-daughters… we are always going to look like someone else." She paused. "Just the other day some lady with red hair from Detroit named Cate Hennessey said I looked like her daughter Bridget." She used her real identity to force the point.

"Penny, I for one believe you." Sheldon spoke up.

"Oh no…" She feared where this would go.

"There is no possible way you could be Supergirl because you're just not smart enough." Sheldon continued. Penny started looking worried.

"Someone who has only been as far as community college would not be able to fool someone with a brain like mine." Sheldon continued talking as he forced a pompous grin. "I'm sorry, Penny, but you're as dumb as brick."

"You're right…" Bridget humored him to continue the facade. "I am…" She leaned back and started picturing his underwear pulled up over his head.

"However," Sheldon dared to go on. "If I may ask, could you have possibly encountered a quantum reality doppelganger counterpart of yourself visiting here from the Anti-Matter Universe?" His left eyebrow arched.

"I've got to remember to stop coming over here." Penny sighed and headed for the door.

While it was barely past seven in Pasadena, California, it was after nine in Detroit, Michigan. Instead of actually meeting someone named Penny Parker in a Pasadena restaurant, Cate Hennessey wrapped the end of her day with housework she had been putting off. Paul was in Chicago covering a football game for the newspaper, Kerry was out somewhere on the way home and her father was watching the local news. One of the news features was about the Air Force maneuvers interrupted by the flying blonde. Without even knowing her identity, the local Fox affiliate covered most of their favorite native daughter's superhero exploits from around the world. They showed the footage of her from the Nashville flood, the tsunami in Haiti, the earthquake in Mexico, the search for a British serial killer and a terrorist cell in South Africa. As far as the sighting in Hawaii, the Air Force was disavowing the sighting of the flying blonde girl over the Pacific as hallucinations by their pilots. The account had a different affect on Cate. Her daughter was traversing everywhere in the world, but she wasn't coming home and telling her about it. Trying to hold back her hostility, Cate finished putting clean sheets in the master bedroom and went on to Kerry's room, formerly Kerry and Bridget's room. Cate wondered if her daughter was ever coming home. As she thought about it, she got even more frustrated, and that made her upset enough to talk out loud to herself.

"Paul, can we go to Hawaii?" Cate griped to herself and covered both sides of an old marital argument. "No, Cate, we can't afford it. Paul, can we go to Hawaii? No, it's not the right time. Paul, can we go to Hawaii to look for your flying daughter in the red cape? Yeah, I'd like to see him get out of THAT one?"

"Catey, honey…" Her father had left the TV downstairs and appeared at the bedroom door. "Can we talk?"

"Sure, dad…"

"Honey, I'd like to talk about the secret with Bridget." He entered the room.

"Dad…." Cate mussed with the sheets on Bridget's bed. "There is no secret. That's just something CJ got into his head. The only secret about her is I don't know where she is."

"Yeah, well…" Jim pulled out Kerry's desk chair to sit down. "Sweetheart, I'm talking about the one where she flies around in that costume helping people."

Cate dropped the comforter and spun around in shock, her hands shaking embarrassingly over her chest.

"Yeah… I know all about it." Jim Eagan confessed and removed his hearing aide. "You see, when you got me this new hearing aide, I noticed if I turned the volume up that I could hear you and Paul whispering to each other when you thought I wasn't listening." He spoke with his head turned up then replaced the hearing aide to his ear and grinned at his little joke.

"Dad…" Cate was discomfited. "Dad, I'm sorry. It's just that…"

"You weren't sure if I could handle it?" Jim asked her. "I know you didn't keep it secret from me because you didn't trust me…"

"No, dad…" Cate knelt to sit on the edge of the unmade bed. "You see… well… Maybe I did…"

"I just kept wondering when you was going to tell me the truth that my granddaughter was that famous girl from all the newspapers…" Jim looked fatherly to his daughter. "And with CJ the other day getting wise and all that… well, I just figured it was time to let you know I could keep a secret too. Did a good job, didn't I…." He tilted his head up grinning. "Now, Catey, I know there's no mutants on our side of the family…" He sat down with Cate on the bed. "But I'm not sure about Paul's side of the family…."

"Dad…"

"Did you by any chance find Bridget in a rocket deserted by the side of the road?"

"No!" Cate smiled and chuckled a bit to herself. "Dad, it's just so frustrating. I mean…" She paused looking for the right words. "You know, when she was still at home, she just disavowed everything. She had this knack… No, this ability to prove she wasn't that girl. She was so adamant and so logical, but now… I've still got mixed feelings about it. I still don't if she was or if she isn't." She sighed. "I just want to know the truth."

"And Kerry…"

"Is convinced the girl is Bridget." She looked to her father. "And dad, God help me, I'm skating on thinking she's right." She paused thinking through five years of memories. "If that girl isn't Bridget, why won't she come home?'

"Princess…" Jim placed his arm around his daughter the same way he did when she was younger. "May it is like the Army. Maybe she was able to live at home when she was starting out, and now… she has to fly it alone." Jim sighed a little bit. "In the meantime, honey, you just have to be proud of her. She's able to do things that no one else can, and she's making the world a better place for it."

"But why do I have to share her with the world?" Cate broke down crying, releasing five years of grief for a daughter she wanted to hold one more time. She had two children, but it was her first born for whom she was grieving. Kerry was going to be a lawyer, and Rory was going to be something else if he ever decided what he wanted to be. Paul would have been happy to see the boy a sports star, but Rory was looking more to his next year of college. He was in his third year at Michigan State University, attending classes during the day and at night, he was hanging out with his frat brothers drinking beer, parting with girls without underwear amidst an unchaperoned frat house. The closest thing they had to a chaperone was Peter Bennett, a graduate from 2005, and he mostly lived his past through the frat brothers, drinking and partying nearly every night. The leaders of the Omega Delta Pi frat house were Eugene Dagastino and John Blutarsky Jr. the son of a former Illinois senator. Called "Dags" by his frat brothers, Dagastino was pre-med with aspirations of becoming a plastic surgeon. Blutarsky was nicknamed "Bluto" like his father in the Sixties. It was his job to help Rory pass his tests to stay on the basketball team, even if it meant getting copies of the tests ahead of time or sneaking answers into places where professors didn't check. Tonight, the frat was partying their basketball defeat over a rival college. Enjoying the freedoms of college, Rory was able to regale the girls hanging on his word with his personal exploits on the court. A beer in one hand, the frat house was reverberating with the music of Lady Gaga. The floor was shaking with dancing. Toilet paper was streamed over the stairs and furnishings. Amidst the partiers, Sondra Bathory from Alpha Beta Pi reached into her cleavage as she kissed Rory and pulled out a roll of paper barely two inches long. He looked at it suspiciously.

"I don't know, Sonny…" The baby-faced unshaven young man reacted surprised. "I promised my parents I'd stay away from that stuff."

"They'll never know…." Sonny loved his big brown eyes and Justin Bieber-like hair. She grinned coquettishly, but Rory looked to Peter for guidance. In the Roman Circus surroundings, their so-called chaperone was hitting on Lisa Welch, five years his junior. She was a pre-med student with Dags and looking forward to playing doctor with the tall good-looking older guy, but Peter nuzzled her neck, kissed her under the ear and looked up to the entry way. There was a security light outside the frat house, and in its glow was a figure who didn't belong. A tall blonde figure with his hair covered by a baseball hat. Blonde tufts of hair poked out from under that cap pulled down over his eyes. He wore a zipped up black leather jacket and blue jeans with dirty sneakers. He wandered in slowly perusing the frat house surroundings, ignoring the two would-be adults in the middle of a display of affection and avoided the two guys chasing the pledge out the entryway of the former mansion. Who ever this person was, they didn't belong, and Peter knew it. He excused himself from his shapely female conquest and strided defiantly up to their visitor.

"Excuse me…" He stood toe to toe with this thin gangly intruder. "Can I help you?"

"Where's Rory Hennessey?" The person asked.

"Rory is indisposed." Peter grinned. "I'm afraid you can't come in here."

The unwanted guest grabbed Peter by his front belt and lifted him off the floor, bouncing his head off the ceiling and dropping him where he once stood. A hundred students heard the loud crash and thump and looked over to the scene. Dags and Bluto stopped drinking long enough to turn their heads to the strange guy who had dropped their favored leader. Watched by almost a hundred partiers, they broke from their poker game and rushed to take this intruder down themselves, but despite his slight frame, their unwanted guest kicked Bluto's feet out from under him, lifted Dags up and tossed him the twelve feet into their bar, shattering a shelf and collapsing over twenty books. By time Rory looked up, Bluto was flying through the big window and landing in the garden. He froze in place as the unknown stranger came marching up to him. The other young adults scattered from the tall powerhouse's presence. He grabbed Rory by the jacket in one hand and clenched his right hand with the burning joint in the other.

"Are you stupid or something?" The intruder yelled at him. "Do you realize what mom and dad would do to you if they knew you were smoking this crap in college? The college would toss you out, and you'd lose your precious basketball scholarship? This is the stupidest most idiotic thing you could do! Do you want to end up one of those creeps always stealing from others just for your next stinking fix?"

"You can't order me around like that!" Rory scowled pinned to the sofa as Sonny froze in fear a foot away on the arm of the sofa. "There's no way I'm…" Rory's eyes bobbed down into his attackers jacket. There wwas a sign of a large red "S" on yellow against a blue shirt around a female bosom. His attacker was a girl. His eyes panned up under that Los Angeles Lakers cap, and recognized eyes he had not seen in over five years.

"Bridget?" He choked.

There was a huge explosion in the room and Rory with his accuser vanished from the scene. The huge torrent of wind blew everything in the room around with the force of a hurricane. One minute Rory and their unwanted guest were at the sofa, the next they were gone. Faces looked around in confusion. Bluto looked up through the window, and Bennett tried standing as he tried forming a thought. In the flash of images and speeding shapes, Rory felt dizzy and then found himself fighting for air. He was in water and fighting for air. Struggling to get his bearings, he finally broke surface and caught his breath. Hidden in those clothes, Bridget had dropped him into the reflective pond on the quad. It was only thirty feet wide and five feet deep at its deepest point. Around him on the campus, three students and a teacher watched him treading water then sloshing out of the water for land. Coughing, freezing and his breath steaming in front of him, Rory sloshed outward for shore. He got the message. Bridget wanted him to get a reality check. Still coughing up the brackish water, he collapsed to his knees.

"I'll never do it again!" He screamed to the starry night.


	9. Chapter 9

9

Night was encroaching over Detroit. The eastern horizon was turning into overlapping shades of orange turning to violet with a faint line of dark blue along the bottom. As the blanket of night came closer, streetlights along the business district started lighting up and traffic increased and motorists headed home to the suburbs like herds of animals obeying forgotten migratory routes. In the Ritter Building, the law offices of MacNichol, Bellows and Flockhart were almost deserted. Aaron MacNichol congratulated partner Peter Bellows for his victory in a custody battle and pulled his coat on in a hurry to meet his wife for dinner. As Aaron headed out the glass doors, Bellows looked over and noticed one of their junior law students at work in one of the empty offices. Beneath that plumage of curly red hair, Kerry Hennessey worked as driven as usual. He thought a second, wondered about the situation and turned away from his usual course out to weave his way over and check on her. To get her attention, the silver-haired George Clooney lookalike lightly rapped at the door. Kerry lifted her head solemnly toward him.

"Miss a ride?" He asked.

"I'm waiting for a response." She answered. Bellows came up toward her and turned her laptop toward him.

"The Social Security Administration?" He recognized the website and looked back at her. "What case is this?"

"No case…" Kerry confessed. "Mrs. Flockhart has a contact in the local office who said they could run by sister's social for activity on it. I have to renew the request every three months."

"You've been looking for your sister a long time."

"Yeah…" Kerry answered. "For five years…"

"How do you know she's still alive?"

"I know…" Kerry sighed, looked at the lights of dusk over the view of the city darkening the room and looked back to Mr. Bellows.

"That's a lot of faith." He responded. "After that much time, several people would have given up…"

"You've got mail." The laptop chirped and cut off his thought. Kerry quickly opened her mail and tapped open the message from the Social Security Administration. It was not a full message. Kerry scanned the Federal logo and address briefly and scrolled down to her contact. The woman was a local administrator named Donna Krakowski who felt for Kerry's plight and sent her the intermittent status reports. Kerry read the message and sighed deeply depressed again. It was not the message she wanted.

"There has been no activity with this Social Security Number since January 2003." Bellows read it aloud. He sighed along with Kerry. "I'm sorry."

"She's got to be using another number." Kerry admitted to herself. "I've got to think outside the box to locate her. I know she's out there."

"You think she's hiding from you?"

"No…" Kerry turned to her other recourse of running her sister's name through the search engines for new links. "But she is making it hard for me to find her."

"Kerry…" Bellows looked to her as a daughter. "If you're putting as much effort into passing the bar as you are in finding your sister…" He paused to clear his throat. "I'll be glad to have you here as a lawyer." He backed up to head home. "I wouldn't be surprised if you make partner." He chuckled and turned out on his left heel. Kerry lit up with a light smile herself and changed her search engine criteria to "Supergirl Sightings." Immediately came a barrage of out-of focus YouTube videos, photo-manipulated images, on-line newspaper reports and a barrage of Supergirl websites. Justin Russo of Waverly Place in Manhattan, New York had a site called the _Supergirl Shrine_ heavily devoted to cross-referencing sightings with photos. Dawson Leery of Cape Side, Massachusetts was mostly devoted to photos from the media on his _Super-Fans of Supergirl_ website, but beyond that, the websites became less than stellar and even demeaning. If appearing at the top of the Google Search result was any indication of the ratings of a website then _Incredible Supergirl Sightings Database_ by Howard Wolowitz of Pasadena, California had the largest most exhaustive research on Bridget in the media. It had an analysis of the sightings, a chronology of witness-contributed accounts, photos, links and scans of articles and magazine analysis, photos and video files and scientific data involving flight plans, examination of the powers and capabilities of the heroine and weekly on-line chats. Kerry had seen most of the photos before; several of the older original Detroit photos from five years ago were being passed off as taken in other cities. Some of them were obvious hoaxes that Howard had busted by comparing known and real images. After seventeen pages of reading nearly identical accounts of guys describing "how hot" or "how cool" this real-life heroine was, Kerry began feeling the pangs of sleep. By 5:30PM, the building around her was completely dark and the illumination of her laptop had caused a decrease in her mental acuity. Her head propped up in her right hand on the desk, Kerry closed her eyes briefly to rest them and without meaning too was dozing off while sitting up. In her dreams, voices from the past echoed back to her from her dreams.

"Stop persecuting your sister!" Her mother's voice was screaming at her from her mind.

"Get her to confess!" The voice of seventeen-year-old Kerry Hennessey echoed from history.

"She can't be that girl!"

"No, you just don't want her to be!" It was an argument she had had several times with her mother when Bridget was at the start of her secret identity. There were several versions of the argument, but they all ended the same with frustration and strained hostility, a mother fighting with her daughter over the secrets of an older sister.

"You're killing me, Bridget!" Kerry stirred a bit in her sleep. A tear dropped down her face. "I'm having nightmares because of you! I'm waking up screaming because I think you're sucking my life out or something. Please… please… You've got to tell me. That girl with the powers… with the stupid costume… Is there anything you have to say to me?"

"That skirt makes you fat…"

"Stop it, stop it!" Cate screamed at her daughters. It was the night of the party for Linda Kent held at the local Lion's Club Banquet Hall near Sterling Heights. Local Detroit businessman, Harold Winkler, who owned the Detroit Tribune, had held the gala event to meet the British-born brunette beauty to the United States. It was also the night of her father's heart attack, but it was also the last time Kerry saw her sister. She replayed the night in her dreams when she went to sleep.

"Mom, please get her to confess!" Kerry pleaded to her mother that night in 2003. "You know it's her. Why are you doing this to me?"

"Kerry, honey, please…" Cate had tried to every time to temper Kerry's frustration with logic. "I don't want to know anymore. It's your sister's secret. Let her have it."

"Mom!" Kerry was losing it.

"Why is this so important to you?" Their argument drew attention from a few of Paul's associates and friends from the Tribune. "Why is it so important to you to know everything about her? Why do you need to know this?"

"Because…" Truthfully, Kerry wasn't sure. Was it because of her own ego or because she couldn't stand the fact her own sister was keeping secrets from her? "Mom, she's been lying about it! We know she's been lying about it! Don't you get the least bit upset when she cons you about it? She's suddenly become so good at it! Don't you care about that at all?"

"I am settling this for the last time!" Cate groaned and stood in her good dress trying to maintain decorum in front of Detroit's elite. She took Kerry by the wrist and led her into the direction of the restrooms where Bridget had vanished. "Kerry, you trashed your sister's belongings! You two have to learn to live together!" She turned from Kerry to her other daughter. "Bridget, I want you two…" She pushed open the door to the restroom and encountered a woman in a black evening dress, the same sort of dress which Bridget was wearing that night. She was Linda Kent, a beautiful woman with shoulder-length black hair and two piercing azure blue eyes.

"I'm sorry, I thought you was my daughter." Cate excused herself. Kerry leaned in a bit looking at this person.

"No problem." Kent's soft voice excused herself and glided out to the gala. Kerry watched her and stood in awe of her presence. Her mother was meanwhile dropping and looking under the doors of the toilet stalls. She would be the person of interest that night for what people saw of her. She had stepped out of the banquet hall to take a phone call and then vanished, just like Bridget, but there was something else. She did see Bridget that night one more time. At the hospital as the rain came pouring down and her father was having emergency heart surgery, she had seen Bridget come racing out of the emergency entrance. Through the rain, she had seen her sister clad in hospital fatigues and screaming her head off having a conniption fit. That was when Kerry finally had her proof. Concealed by the rainy mist from a second floor window, she had watched her sister rip away the hospital garb to reveal that costume… that costume she had tore up the house several times looking for it. That blue leotard with the red "S" on it with the red cape and skirt, she had seen her sister wearing it just before she vanished off into the night and was never seen again. Kerry had kept it a secret from her parents for over a year and only told them after her mother left Sterling Heights Medical Center. The truth was out; she finally had her proof, but what did it manner? Bridget was never seen again. A Missing Persons report had been issued, but the leads never panned out. The body of a blonde girl had been found in the Huron River south of the airport, but it was the body of a missing flood victim from the year before. In the meantime, Supergirl sightings were coming from everywhere. From New York City, London, Seattle, Cairo, Argentina, Tokyo… they gave Cate hope and they gave Kerry something to be proud of, but there was one thing everyone had overlooked. What had happened to Linda Kent that night? Did she just dismiss herself in the confusion when Kerry's father was raced to the hospital? No one had seen her again after that. No, there was something else… something Kerry had forgotten. Something Rory had mentioned to her. Something she had forgotten after getting her proof at the hospital. While Rory was filling his pickets with sushi, shrimp and other appetizers, he had just casually looked out the window and saw Miss Kent racing outside the Lion's Club… pulling off her wig to reveal blonde hair as she ducked behind a van then shooting up into the air in a red and blue costume!

"I never saw them together!" Kerry woke up from her dream screaming and standing up at the desk. That's why her mother never found Bridget in the restroom; she had left it right under their noses as Linda Kent! How could she have missed that? If Bridget could fly and deflect bullets, why couldn't she disguise her appearance? She'd been searching the wrong name! Linda was the first name of Supergirl in the comics; Kent was the last name of Superman's civilian identity in public. How could she have missed that? Briefly checking her watch, Kerry typed in a new search:

"British heiress, Linda Kent, Supergirl Sightings…"

Up popped a few links from newspapers in Toronto, London and New York City. Bolstered by this new memory, Kerry noticed that Supergirl had saved victims of a sinking ship the same week Linda Kent donated money to a children's hospital in Toronto. Her face appeared in a London Gazette for a contribution to AIDS research the month that Supergirl stopped a terrorist attack in Britain. During the height of Supergirl sightings in New York City, Linda Kent was reported to be staying at the swanky Whittendale Tower in Manhattan.

"Where did she get all this money?" Kerry held up a photo of Bridget from her cell phone to compare with Miss Kent's on the Internet. The similarity was there, but it was not exact. She clicked over to a photos-only search. Several pictures of the reclusive heiress popped up, recycled for several separate articles. Among them, Kerry noticed a group picture and clicked on it.

"Bridget…" She sat stunned. It was her sister, blonde hair, grinning ear to ear and everything in a long blue graduation gown and cap from the Bay City Community newspaper in San Francisco. She was a graduate of Doherty High School on the west coast in 2006, but who were these other girls with her in the newspaper photo? The article read:

"Billie Daniels, the daughter of British philanthropist Linda Kent, graduates Valedictorian with a perfect 4.0 GPA from Doherty High School in the Nob Hill section of San Francisco. She plans on attending UCLA with majors in business and economics with a minor in acting. Pictured with her left to right are Piper Halliwell, Prue Halliwell, Sabrina Spellman and Phoebe Halliwell." Kerry couldn't look away. She had found her sister. She knew where she was.

"How many stinking secret identities do you have?" Kerry asked the image of her sister grinning out at her from the newspaper.

On the East Coast, the historical village of Grandview north of Philadelphia was saying good-bye to another of its oldest structures. The old brownstone was more than two hundred years old. It had been a hotel and even a house of ill repute at one time, but since 1968, it had been an apartment house for five separate families. Whether the fire was started by old wiring or bored teenagers who didn't know better, the location was now full of flame and pillars of black smoke pouring through the location. The crackling of old wood filled the structure, floors turned to ash and collapsed and personal possessions vanished to the ages. Fire department personnel charged through with military-level like training dousing everything in site with streams of water fired at eight hundred pounds per square inch. Outside the creaking and crumbling structure, natives and on-lookers watched from a distance with residents sitting from the corner as their homes and belongings were taken from them. Among them, attractive Melinda Gordon, the local antique store owner, watched helplessly concerned to see someone carried from the torrent of fire and smoke. Her husband, Jim Clancy, was one of the area paramedics. He hurried to tend to the young fire victim. Her face was blackened by soot, her hair and clothes covered with the scent of cinders and her left arm charred and burnt. Jim started administering first aid to get her breathing again, but Melinda with her own special abilities saw something else. A waft of smoke that didn't burn wafted from the young lady and gradually turned into a doppelganger of the girl on the stretcher. Melinda was seeing her spirit. She was dying.

"What's happening?" Lisa Spears looked around confusingly. "What's happening?" She looked around and saw Jim giving her CPR. "Please someone! My baby's upstairs! She's in her room on the top floor!"

"DeFib, quick!" Jim placed an oxygen mask on Lisa and grabbed the defibulator from the ambulance. Lowest setting first, he pulled the pallets and placed them to Lisa's chest and shocking her back. Her spirit was jerked back into her body when her heart restarted. Lisa started choking and fighting to clear her throat.

"Jim…" Melinda rushed up to him. "I saw her spirit. She has a baby inside."

"What?" Jim had never any reason to not believe her psychic senses. "Someone will get her."

"How do you know?" She turned to race toward the structure but Mike Switzer and Kevin Shatner of the fire squad grabbed and caught her. The flames were intense. Their microwave energy was a heavy wall that pushed her back. The noise was incredible. The crispy crunch of wood being blackened into cinder, the crackling of furniture covered in flames and the cacophony of flames dancing around and consuming everything in their path.

"Melinda, what are you doing?" Kevin held her at the door.

"There's a baby on the top floor!"

Charlie spun around to see the staircase crumbling to the first floor and the basement. One of his friends came down hard from the collapsing second floor and broke his leg. That way up no longer existed. All Mike could do was grab his fallen his comrade, and pull him out behind Melinda pushed out of the way. Through the fracas of dancing flames and crumbling furnishings, Melinda could hear a baby crying somewhere.

"Kevin, what are you doing?" The frantic beauty screamed.

"Melinda, we'd never get up there in time!" Kevin's blue eyes felt sorry. "No one could!"

The wind suddenly soared and a streak of red pierced over their heads. In its path, a few pieces of the front wall came tumbling down and a front window façade came crashing down. No one had seen it, but several teenagers started cheering. What was going on? Were they cheering the fire? Pulled backward from the crumbling edifice, Melinda noticed people looking up and pointing to the third floor. Descending down on the portent of hot air, a young blonde beauty descended down on invisible wings into an open parting of the rescue squad and firemen. Clad in blue with a short red skirt and red cape, she embraced close to her chest a tiny baby boy in a slightly charred blue blanket. Barely harmed, the tiny child clung to the bright red "S" on her costume as Bridget descended down to the sidewalk and turned to Melinda. The local teens knew who the blonde goddess was and tried getting closer to meet her.

"Here you go…" Bridget passed the boy into Melinda's arms. "I think he's safer with you."

"Who? How?" Melinda was stunned. Maybe it had something to do with her ability to see ghosts and spirits, but when she looked at Bridget she saw a powerful light and aura illuminating her body. It wasn't just the glow… it was the image of huge wings of light from behind her that she noticed. Although she mostly passed over and ignored the tabloid articles of this alleged real-life heroine, she had never read anything about her having wings or a bright heavenly glow. What she was seeing had to be for her eyes only, and it had to do something about her ability to see ghosts.

"Are you an angel?" Melinda took the child from her. Bridget didn't answer. She just stepped back, tilted her head back and began hovering upward quickly until she reached the level of the third floor. The fire was fizzling out under her in her hurry to return to the heavens. Melinda arched her head stunned unsure how to describe what she had seen, but somehow, she suspected this blonde heroine was a lot more than what she seemed.


	10. Chapter 10

10

Of all the things Teddy Duncan liked to do, babysitting was not high on her list of priorities. She loved her baby sister, Charlie, but she preferred watching her on her own time, not when it conflicted with her social engagements. On this bright and sunny day, she took her sister to Cheesman Park to play with the other toddlers at the kiddie area of the park, but the only one who actually seemed to get anything out of it was her brother PJ who reverted back to his childhood in the slide, chutes and tunnels.

"That's so fun…" The big blonde goof giggled and chuckled as he romped with pre-schoolers.

"Yeah…" Teddy was holding Charlie in the path of the park with the baby stroller by her side. "But it is meant for kids under so tall." She placed her hand down to three feet tall.

"I was once that tall." PJ chuckled and looked over to the swings off the path. He looked to the top of the hill and back to his sister. "In fact, I'm taller now." He added. Teddy could only groan in unison with a sigh.

"You know," PJ continued. "If you still want to meet your date, I can take Charlie off your hands. I can take her home for you."

"No, you just want to exploit her." Teddy was tempted to take his offer but knew better. With her sister in the stroller, she started pushing her sister to the crest of the hill under the trees to head down to the entry of the park. "She's our sister. Not a magnet for you to attract dates."

"I have no idea why those girls thought I was her father!"

"You just went along with what they said." Teddy looked back at him.

"Hey," PJ grinned that goofy grin again. He liked it when the girls went gaga over him. "I'm just spreading the love."

"But you're not using Charlie to do it." Teddy reached out to take Charlie's stroller and reached to empty air. She looked again. In the path under the tree, the stroller was absent and rolling away down the path. Teddy's eyes widened in shock and her lips parted into a scream. PJ did a double take and looked again as Charlie rolled on down the steps, the uneven surface jostling her delicately. All the one-year old could see was sky and clouds and birds from her perspective. Giggling at the trees whizzing past her, she had no idea her older sister was chasing after her.

"Charlie!" Teddy jumped a trashcan and PJ cleared the stone steps up to the playground. Up ahead, a mom in the park with her kids dived to save Charlie but missed. The stroller continued rolling out of the park and out into Hammond Street where a Dodge Neon swerved to miss her and take out a mail box and newspaper box. Her brother and sister racing after her, Charlie and her stroller crossed Hammond and continued down Fifteenth Street.

"Hi, Bob…" The kid's mother, Amy Duncan, stopped on Lexington Road at the Fifteenth Street red light. "I just wanted to let you know I'm on the way home. What do you want for dinner?"

"Spaghetti."

"That's easy enough." Amy sat listening to the radio as she waited for the light to change. "How your day?"

"Termite job at the Old Fontana Place." The big burly pest man was in the crawlspace under the mansion. "God, this place is spooky. Always feel as if I'm going to find a dead body."

"Just clean up before you come home…." Amy sighed over her busy day at the hospital then noticed a stroller roll through the intersection in front of her. "That looks just like…"

Teddy and PJ raced by chasing the rolling stroller.

"Oh my GOD!"

At the bottom of the hill, a commuter bus turned on to Fifteenth Street. As Charlie and her stroller rolled down the center of the street between the cars and surprised looks of drivers, PJ and Teddy came racing after it. Teddy's chest was pounding. PJ was wheezing. Police officers in a parked patrol car scrambled to rescue the lost stroller, but they just barely missed it. The commuter bus was coming closer and closer. Wider than the cars, it left little room for the stroller to roll by unscathed. PJ 's leg gave out just past a tow truck and he went down tumbling a few feet from his momentum. Her lungs about to burst, Teddy collapsed just ten feet from her brother. Her left leg giving out, she put her hands out and fell face first into the asphalt. She heard the bus screeching to a stop. The smell of brake oil burning filled the air then the sound of a crash. Several passengers of the bus lurched forward from the sudden stop or landed in the aisle. Gritting her teeth in misery, Teddy feared the worse.

"Aren't you the cutest little thing?" Her feet entrenched to receive the impact, Bridget left the imprint of one hand and her left shoulder in the front of the bus. Peering down to the cooing little angel in the stroller, she beamed and lit up before little Charlie. She had stopped the bus and saved another infant from a horrible fate. From the sidewalk, a few pedestrians stopped to attempt photos from their camera phones while others just ignored the sight and went about their business. Teddy's jaw dropped in surprise. Hastening to get out of the street, PJ jumped limping on one foot from curbside and cheered the mysterious blonde.

"You're… you're…" Teddy tried to form words.

"Welcome?" Bridget turned Charlie over to her big sister then did a pirouette up over the street, levitating over the bus and extended her arm to take flight again. The wind caught her and she started sailing away. He had finally met her. He had read all about her on the Internet and he finally met her. PJ could not be more overjoyed. Teddy meanwhile started wondering how she was going to spin this into her video library.

Back in Detroit, Kerry was at the family computer in the living room of the house. She was spending her day off working on her law school requirements and typing up her reports on law cases that had professor wanted her to research and analyze. Her grandfather was in his chair reading the newspaper, trying to ignore the sound of her typing, but as she typed, her cousin CJ had sidled up slowly close to her. He was clad in a blue shirt and tan khakis like a Chicago area shoe salesman. He was clean-shaven, but his mop of blonde hair hung low despite being cut around his ears. She never knew exactly what he was going to say. He had the ego of an artist of wisecracks, but he had the heart of someone who card a lot about his closest friends and family. He liked to think Kerry was his favorite cousin, but right now, he was distracting her.

"What?" She stopped typed and sharply acknowledged him with a high volume of annoyance in her voice.

"Kerry…. Care Bear…" He was grinning. He wanted something. Behind him, his Aunt Cate came up with laundry from the basement. "What's the family secret about Bridget?" He asked.

Cate stopped and turned around interested. Kerry looked to her and back to CJ. Her grandfather looked over the newspaper.

"You mean… besides the fact we don't know where she is." Kerry responded matter-of-factly.

"Heh-heh-heh…" CJ looked back to Cate. "So, the cover-up continues…" He looked back to Kerry. "Look, I can keep a secret. I'm a member of this family. Ain't I? Ain't I?"

"CJ…" Jim fussed with the paper as he folded it in half to set it aside. "Aren't you going to be late getting back to work?"

"Awww…" CJ postured a bit. "How much damage could those kids get into if I'm not back before the bell rings?" He thought about the history class he taught at Kerry's old high school.

"Enough to get you fired." Kerry knew those kids.

"Good point." He turned around to the door and took his car keys out with a moment to stop and make known his presence. "I will figure this out!" He opened the door to the porch as Paul came back home from the train station. With him in the Michigan State University jacket was Rory coming home for the weekend. His hair was uncombed, his jeans were dirty and his t-shirt was untucked, but he grinned ear-to-ear to see his mother again.

"It's the boy!" Paul brought his son home. Kerry saved her work on the computer quickly and jumped up to see her brother. It seemed she had a frozen image of him at seventeen constantly annoying her or busting Bridget five years ago for coming home late, but now, she was proud of the twenty-something year old basketball athlete. Paul was so proud of the boy and where he was going. Rory was now taller than her, and almost as tall as his mother. Rather than rising to the occasion, Jim wanted his turn than bother to get up on his cane to meet the boy.

"Home…" Rory was grinning as he hugged his mother and sister. "A clean bed, home cooking, free laundry…" He dropped his bag at his mother's feet and noticed his cousin. "CJ! How's my room?"

"Same…" CJ looked at Kerry then back to him. "What's the family secret about Bridget?" He asked.

"You mean besides the fact we don't know where she is." Rory answered.

"CJ…" Cate stepped closer. "Isn't there a classroom on fire with your name on it?"

"I will solve this!" He was backing out the door. "If it takes me a thousand years and a million lives…" He heard fire engines nearby and worried over his job. "Gotta go!" He hastened to his jeep as Cate swung the door behind him. Turning to her son, she waited for Paul to stop expressing his love for the boy… now a tall full-grown college man.

"Oh, no…no." Cate saw something she didn't like. "The beard, the stubble, the soul-patch… it's all got to go." She wanted the boy she had before he went to college.

"Mom…"

"If you want me to do your laundry…"

"Cate," Paul played defense. "Let the boy keep the beard." He got the look from her and quickly gave in to turn back around. "You know, Rory, it does grow back."

"All right, I'll shave it…." Rory chuckled under breath. "Grandpa!" He noticed his mother's father looking annoyed.

"Took you long enough!" Jim lost his surly expression as Rory hugged him and turned round to another pat on the back from his father. Paul placed his arm contently around the boy.

"So…" He looked at the man. Last time he saw him, his father was in the recuperation stage after his heart surgery and his mother was seeing hallucinations of Bridget around the hospital and in town. Except for his big sister's absence, everything was back to normal. "Is CJ still five years behind the rest of us?"

"If you mean your sister flying around the world in a red cape and deflecting bullets off her chest…" Jim Eagan resettled himself a bit in the chair. "Yeah, that secret…"

Rory reacted surprised. He looked to Kerry first then his parents.

"Yeah, he knows…" Paul sat on the arm of the sofa next to Cate and in front of his prodigal son. "Damn hearing aid…."

"Worth every penny…." His father-in-law lifted himself on his cane to head for the downstairs bathroom.

"Yeah…" Cate was still smiling as she set the laundry basket off the sofa. "So, Rory… how's college? Who's this girl you've been talking about in your letters? How are your grades?"

"How is the basketball team going?" Paul wanted to know stuff important to him.

"We've won five out of eight." Rory starred unzipping his jacket. "I think I finally settled on a major." He tossed his jacket over one of the stools in the kitchen. "I'm going to go into drama. I want to act. I want to do movies." He grinned that boyish grin again. "In fact, I think I know someone in California who can probably get me in the business."

"Like who…" Standing near the computer, Kerry reacted curious.

"Bridget."

Everyone drew stunned and silent.

"Did he say Bridget?" Jim called through the door the first floor bathroom.

"Wait a minute…" Kerry came up to him. "What do you mean, Bridget can get you into acting?" Her eyes drew suspiciously. "Rory… what do you know about Bridget that we don't?"

"I ran into her in college." Rory confessed.

"What?" Cate and Paul both jumped to their feet. Rory was immediately grabbed by his mother desperate to know the truth. "You saw her? What was she doing? How does she look? Did she look well? How is she?"

"Is she still…." Paul sought the right words. "Kryptonian?"

"Oh yeah…" Rory rolled his eyes nervously. He turned to the refrigerator to get some juice and pour himself a drink. He had rehearsed how he was going to tell them, but even then, he wasn't sure how to say it. "She kind of tossed three guys around like rag dolls and dropped me into the reflective pool on campus from twenty feet above it…"

Cate's jaw dropped. Kerry turned around stunned and dropped into her grandfather's seat.

"Rory, could you speak a bit more clearly?" Cate's father called from the toilet. "It sounded like you said she crossed three rag dolls and hopped over the campus twenty times."

"Dad!" Cate tried to hush him.

"Wait a second…" Paul reacted confused. "Why would she do that?"

"I was hoping you wouldn't ask that." Rory poured some juice and replaced the juice back to the shelf. "But it seems there might have been drugs and alcohol involved…"

"Rory!" Paul reacted shocked. Kerry just turned away to avoid that talk.

"Rory Joseph Hennessey!" Cate was more upset. "You… you…" She was so angry she couldn't think. "You are not going back to that college!"

"Mom, I'm sorry." Rory reacted ashamed. "I've been drinking a lot of beer, yeah, but I never used any drugs. They were just offered to me, but I didn't use them." He paused embarrassed; his head held low. "Look, Bridget stopped me from a major- major- mistake."

"What does this mean to your scholarship?" Kerry stood arms crossed with her back to the family computer.

"I think I'm okay…" Rory confessed. "The fraternity is on probation, the coach ran us an extra mile, but I'm not getting expelled."

"And what's this thing about Bridget getting you into acting?" Cate now stood with her arms crossed.

"She was wearing a Los Angeles Lakers cap." Rory tried to move the attention off himself.

"She was wearing a what?" Grandpa was still in the bathroom.

"A Los Angeles Lakers cap!" Paul yelled the fresh news to his father-in-law.

"That doesn't mean she's living in LA, you idiot." Kerry scoffed. "She probably got it in San Francisco."

"That's right…" Paul was still getting over the fact his favorite child was drinking and close to drugs. "She probably got it in…." He stopped and did a double take. Cate and Paul now turned round in unison to face their red-haired daughter.

"Where'd San Francisco come from, Care Bear?"

"San Francisco?" Kerry now found herself on the spot. She looked into their confused faces staring at her. Now Rory and the two of them were looking at her suspiciously with their arms folded.

"Did I forget to tell you about that?"

Almost three hundred miles south of San Francisco on the west coast and north of Los Angeles, Leonard Hofstader was leading the way onward to another weekly ritual at the local Comics World affiliate. He purchased a lot of his comic books and superhero memorabilia from the location. Along the way, he and the guys were usually involved in a spirited debate about the perimeters and trivial details of the comic book universe.

"Dude, I'm telling you." Raj spoke up. "The Hulk could definitely beat Superman up."

"Au contraire…" Sheldon brought up the rear of their party down the stairs from the apartment. "The Hulk only has superhuman strength, but Superman has strength, speed and super-hearing. He'd hear the Hulk coming from miles away and stay away from him. Plus, he has his heat vision. He could use that to slow down the Hulk."

"Yeah, but what about the madder Hulk gets, the stronger he gets." Leonard rarely took Sheldon's side in these debates. "Eventually, he's going to be able to inflict some major damage to even Superman."

"Not likely…" Sheldon continued. "Superman has a healing factor."

"Not as good as Wolverine's." Raj pointed out.

"You know what I'd like to see…" Howard grinned a bit. "Wonder Woman and the She-Hulk getting in a cat fight… ripping each other's clothes off…" At that moment, a very attractive blue-eyed brunette entered the lobby of the building. She was wearing a form-fitting white sweater with a dark violet skirt down to her ankles. Her eyes were pure azure, but upon hearing Howard mention, "ripping each other's clothes off," she stopped, paused and realized it was a conversation she wanted no part of. Leonard was automatically attracted to her shapely figure, and as Raj became mute in her presence, Howard was trying to picture her without the sweater and skirt. Somehow, the brunette beauty sensed their attraction and turned back to the mailboxes.

"Excuse me…" She had scanned the mailboxes. "Does Billie Daniels still live in the building?"

"Allow me to introduce myself…" Howard pushed his way to meet her. "Howard Wolowitz… the future man of your dreams, and your name, my azure-eyed goddess?" He tried to kiss her hand.

"Engaged…" Prue Halliwell took her hand back from him. "I'm looking for a friend of mine who is supposed to live here. She's blonde, tall, athletic build…"

"There's no one named Billie in the building…" Leonard spoke up. "But there is a girl with that description. Her name's Penny and she lives in 402."

"Thanks…" Prue slipped by them and headed up the stairs. As she passed Sheldon, the tall physicist barely acknowledged her and looked back to Howard. He thought for a minute and stepped down off the staircase to the main floor.

"Did you think you was actually going to get anywhere with her?" He asked Howard.

"It was worth a shot."

"I thought she was hot." Raj broke his silence.

"Yeah…" Leonard pushed the way out of the building to head to the comics shop. "I don't what it was… but she had this sort of… I don't know, magical thing about her."

On the fourth floor, Prue walked past the guy's apartment and noticed Apartment 402 at the bottom of the stairs to the fifth floor. Stepping up to it, she lightly rapped at the door. It had been a few years since she had last seen Bridget as Billie. She knew all about her past and powers and had even helped her get used to expanding her mystical senses. In return, Bridget had even saved her life and that of her sisters a few times from forces beyond understanding. To this day, she was still amazed at her power, and her younger sister Paige was even at times jealous of them, but even with all they did know about Bridget and her abilities, there was still a lot they did not understand about them.

"Billie?" Prue knocked again. Looking behind her and to the stairs, the blue-eyed beauty showed a power of her own. She pointed at the doorknob as it unlocked and swung open partially. Stepping forward, she let herself in and looked around the small apartment. A few dishes were left out on the counter to the kitchen, some clothes were left over the sofa and the front window to the street was slightly ajar. A stack of tabloid magazines were on the floor by the sofa, and a dirty bowl with a spoon in it rested on the futon behind the sofa. Glancing around, Prue saw a photo of Bridget and Sabrina from their trip to Australia over the television cabinet. Next to it was a picture of Kerry from Detroit and then another with Prue, Bridget and Phoebe taken at a fund-raiser back at Golden Gate Park. The place was disorganized and a little bit of a mess. She picked up the bowl, two cups and a random spoon off the floor and headed to the kitchen sink to place them in water.

"Several years later and she still doesn't do housework…." Prue reverted to habit and tried to clean up a little. At least there was dishwashing liquid, it meant she was trying. A few more dirty dishes in the sink, Prue tied her long dark locks of hair behind her and picked up a halter top off the floor. When she stood up, she felt a rush of wind through the apartment. The window parted fully and Bridget stood there before her in full Kryptonian presence, her blonde hair cascading down over her cape, a large red "S" emblazoned to her chest above her bosom and a short red skirt to match her red boots. It was maybe the twentieth or twenty-fifth version of the same outfit. Back in San Francisco, Bridget had the poofed sleeves and low neckline with the insignia over her heart like the Eighties version of the DC Comics character, but now she was back to the form-fitting leotard and large "S" over her chest.

"You didn't just come here to clean up after me, did you?" Bridget asked her.

"No…" Prue looked her over in that silly costume. "Piper still wants her Beatles Sgt. Pepper CD back."

"It's on the shelf…." Bridget glided over removing her cape, draping it over the sofa and then hugging Prue fondly like a sister. "Oooo, it's so good to see you again. How are Piper and Leo?"

"Fine…" Prue smiled a bit. "Did you get the new pictures of the baby?"

"I did…" Bridget recalled the e-mail and moved the newspaper to coax Prue to sit by her on the sofa. "So, what's the honor of this visit? Don't want to be rude but I did have premonitions of a possible suicide in Seattle and a bus crash in Toronto I have to get to…"

"Bridget…" Prue took a deep breath and leaned back into the sofa sideways before the young demigoddess. "I got an e-mail from your sister in Detroit."

Bridget was slow to respond. She turned slowly, placed both her feet to the floor and sighed with a deep breath.

"I figured as much…" She responded tiredly. "Her research to track me down is getting better. I just ran into Rory last week at his college." She looked back to Prue. "I had a dream he lost his scholarship, and I had to prevent it. I can only guess what he's telling my parents."

"Why don't you just go home?"

"I can't…" Garbed in just her blouse and skirt, Bridget rose to head into her kitchen. "Haven't you heard? Bridget Hennessey no longer exists. I gave up my identity so that my father would survive his surgery." She stopped to pour herself some juice. "That's the promise I made…"

"Yeah, I've encountered my own fair share of gods and angels…" Prue sighed a bit and stood back up. "But your sister is going to find out where you are."

"She's going to bust Penny…." Bridget pointed out. "Not Bridget, who no longer exists…." She sipped her juice. "Look, if Kerry finds me, she finds me…. I trust her. I know she can keep my secret."

"So you're not going to do anything about it."

"I had a lot of fun deceiving her and hiding my identity from her back home, but I can't help her bust me." She paused for a moment. "She has to do it herself."

"You're not going to do anything?"

"I could move to live in London next…" Bridget thought about it. "I kind of like doing that English accent." She did it again then reverted back to her normal voice. "But I'd feel bad about leaving Leonard…" She looked figuratively back to the guy's apartment. "I've kind of become fond of him."

"The guy with the glasses from across the hall?"

"That's him…" Bridget finished her juice. "He's got potential…"

"What about your secret?"

"I'll cross that bridge when I get to it." Bridget answered taking her cape back and pulling it back over her shoulders to reattach to her costume.

"I'd be careful doing that…" Prue picked up a few articles of clothing to toss together in a pile in the chair. "Remember David? If we hadn't erased his memories…" She turned briefly to adjust a lamp, but when she looked again, she was talking to an empty apartment.

"I hate it when she does that."


	11. Chapter 11

11

The Winchester Brothers could not walk past a newsstand without one or two tabloid magazines claiming that they busted Supergirl's identity. The Sun claimed she was Britney Spears; the Examiner claimed that she was Reese Witherspoon. Time Magazine had run an article calling her the most intriguing paranormal mystery of the Twenty-First Century. In their article, special effects experts, sociologists, paranormal researchers and professional debunkers had analyzed the on-going phenomenon, debated the sightings and witness testimonies and came out with a neutral conclusion. There was a chance that the Supergirl entity existed, but the evidence also showed a high chance for fraud and invalid accounts. The only people who did not need to be convinced she existed were her fans and the witnesses. In some cities in the United States, criminal activity had decreased by as much as ten to fifteen percent after her appearance. In St. Louis, Missouri, a known cat burglar named Mark James Hackett had entered Prestige Jewelers through the roof. From the top of the building, he had opened an large air conditioner vent, tied off rope gear meant for mountaineering and then dropped himself down into the vent and descended the five floors for the jewelry story on the bottom. Maneuvering through the darkened maze of vents and grills, he surpassed the jewelry store's security system and reached their vault, but as he reached to detach the exterior vent from inside the wall, a powerful force grabbed a hold of his line and pulled him up and out of the vent banging into the sides, slamming into the sides and screaming as he was lurched out of the structure. When he finally regained her his mental faculties, he was tied and wrapped up tightly to the cell phone tower outside at eighty feet off the ground. Floating before him high off the building, Bridget held suspended before him with a look of disappointment on her face.

"Hi, pudding…" She said it sarcastically. "Don't get up, I see you're a bit tied up right now." She dropped as if she was falling, but she was actually using gravity to pick up enough momentum to carry her across the Mississippi and toward the East Coast.

"The last name on your list, Earl?" Randy Hickey looked to his brother.

"The last name on my list." Earl looked back to his brother from the driver's seat of their classic Mustang. "Mr. James Leon Cooley, 644 Elmhurst Drive…" They were residents of Garden City of Camden County, Maryland. It was called the Trailer Park Capital of the United States, and for the last several years, Earl was trying to fix his karma by making a list of everyone he had did wrong and either apologizing or fixing his mistake. The last name on Earl's list was Mr. Cooley of Turner's Grade near the Maryland-West Virginia State Line. It had taken some time and research, but Earl had finally tracked down Cooley through five previous addresses. The last was a ramshackle ranch house on Rural Route 13 just north of Turner's Grade near the highway out of Hagerstown. The property was surrounded by a chain-link fence and was littered with beer cans around a tree that had a chain around it for a missing dog. What mattered was that Earl had found the last name on his list. A big grin on his face, he ambled past the huge SUV parked in the driveway, let himself through the gate and followed the light of the porch light on the front landing. It was almost midnight and with the big tree in the front yard, they couldn't see the stars over head. Randy noticed they didn't see any neighbors either. It was just this one house out in the middle of open rambling hillside land. Earl knocked encouragingly at the front door glad to have reached his last name. From inside the house, a hound dog started barking, there was a clatter of beer cans and beer bottles and Jimmy "Junkyard Jim" Cooley arrived in the open door at all of six feet tall and balding brown hair. His thick brown mustache concealed the annoyed grimace of his lips. His thick eyebrows furrowed over his ice blue eyes.

"Yeah?" He stood there in the door with an open half-empty beer in his hand. A John Wayne Army movie played inside the house.

"Mr. Cooley, I don't know if you remember me…." Earl spoke up earnestly. "But my name is Earl Hickey from Garden City of Camden County, Maryland…."

"Trailer Park Capital of the US…" Randy added.

"But a couple of years ago I was racing a trans-am down Ellsworth Avenue…."

"In Camden County…." Randy added again.

"And I might have side-swiped you a bit in the race… causing you to plow through the playground and through the McDonalds. " Earl continued. "I was just wanted to find you and apologize. I never meant for that to happen. I should have stopped and seen that you were all right."

"That was you…" Cooley knew that day very well. There was not a day that didn't go by that he did not think of that accident. "I spent a day in jail because of that accident. The cops said I was drinking. Lost my job and my wife as a result…."

"Oh…" Earl and Randy exchanged looks. "Sorry to hear that. Is there anything we can do to make to up to you?"

"Yeah…" Cooley got a weird sort of grin on his face. "Just wait right here a minute…" He turned away from the door and stroked his hound dog on the way to his dining room in back. Earl beamed a big grin to his brother.

"It feels like my karma is finally getting better!" He grinned. He heard the sound of a shotgun getting cocked. It expelled a spent shell, took two new ones and was held up toward Earl and Randy. The two Camden County took the sight of the shotgun aimed at them to start screaming. Cooley squeezed the trigger and the blast took out a branch on the tree in the front yard. The two guys from Camden County were racing back for their car outside the fence. Randy dived through the passenger window. Earl very quickly restarted the engine as Cooley's lousy aim took out his side window.

"Where's your karma?" Randy was down in the floor of the front seat.

"Maybe it just takes a minute to reboot!" Earl was hunched down and trying to drive over the dashboard. "You know… like the clock on the microwave."

Cooley's huge black Ford truck shot out of his driveway, crushed a few bushes across the street and righted itself to give chase. His shotgun was reloaded and he had three more in the rack in his back window. Driving with his right hand, he extended his left hand with his shotgun out the window and readied his aim. As his speedometer hastened up to eighty miles an hour, he barreled down on the Mustang trying the skirt him in the distance. He fired and the back window of it exploded into shards of glass.

"Earl, hit the gas!"

"I've got the pedal to the medal as it is!" He had the same face he had when he saw those two old people having sex at the old folks home. It was a mixture of shock and fear. "Trust me! I've got a lot of good karma coming my way!"

Cooley blasted a stop sign on the turn. On the other side, Earl's Mustang jumped a small dip in the road. Cooley's huge gas-guzzler hit the same dip and was launched just a bit higher into the air. The shells in his chosen shotgun spent, he took down the deer rifle from behind him. As he reached for it, his eyes caught a brief glance of the view in his rear view mirror; something had come down out of the sky behind him with long flowing blonde hair, a flapping red cape and a womanly shape coming straight for him.

"Do you think he's still behind us?" Randy asked Earl. They heard a strange grinding noise and looked out the left side of their car. Cooley's huge Ford pick-up was now upside down and sliding forward on it's crushed cabin on its own momentum. Its four tires pointed skyward on that old highway; Earl and Randy's heads turned watching it slide past them, continuing to slide past them at eighty miles an hour and even overtake them on their left side. How the heck did that happen? Gradually slowing down, it finally stopped and caught on the railroad crossing before them. Earl drove past it in his Mustang just as the crossing lights started flashing and the bells started ringing. In the far distance, a faraway train sounded. Earl and his brother casually looked back at the wrecked car on the train tracks they were leaving behind. The train sounded again a bit closer. Earl slowed down a bit. Under the bells and flashing lights, he heard Cooley under the car screaming his head off and over that, he heard the roar of the train coming closer.

"Earl, why are you stopping?" Randy watched as Earl continued looking back.

The train sounded.

"I just got my karma back." Earl told his brother. "I ain't going to lose it now." He tossed his brother the key to the trunk. "Get the crowbar."

The train roared louder coming closer and Earl knew it. He raced back to the train tracks with the flipped truck and Cooley under it. The cab was right on the ground. The crushed window was barely wide enough for him to get through. Earl tried opening the door, but it was too mangled and distorted to come free that way. Cooley could feel the train tracks rattling up from under him. He couldn't see the train, but hear the train crossing flashing and the bells.

A train whistle sounded over the ridge.

"Earl, get me out of here!" He was going nuts. His heart pounded scared to death. His arms flailed and fought to get himself out from under his truck.

"I'm trying!" Earl took the crowbar from his brother and stuck it in between the door and the frame. He pulled heard on it. Randy pulled on it with his bare hands. The train roared louder. Randy saw lights from it in the distance.

"I wish we had the Jaws of Life!" Earl screamed.

"They're in the trunk!" Randy screamed back hysterical. The train whistle sounded on this side of the ridge.

"Well, go get them!" Earl continued trying with the crowbar, and Randy went to get another tool. Under his legs, Cooley looked out. Far in the distance, the far engine light came into view…

"Earl!"

"I'm trying!" Earl was getting scared. His hands were shaking. His pulse was racing! Someone tapped him on the shoulder. He looked over and saw the most beautiful girl he had ever seen.

"Excuse me, sweetie…" Dressed in that red cape and short red skirt with the huge red "S" across her chest, Bridget stepped in, grabbed the door in her hands and started pulling on it. Her fingers actually pierced the steel. Her hands reached around the door and pulled it, bent it and ripped it free with part of the frame. The train was barreling down on them. Earl grabbed Jimmy Cooley and pulled him free as a loud thunderous noise filled the air. The truck was no more. In its place charging through the crossing were hundreds of tons of huge Detroit steel fashioned as train cars just a few feet from them. Box cars covered in New York graffiti, train cars carrying automobiles, gas propane tanks, more box cars, empty flat beds, empty coal cars… they all roared by with huge gusts of wind tossed up by the underside of the speeding behemoth. Lying on his back, Earl watched the blonde goddess ascending up from the other side of the train. Randy stood over them carrying the hydraulic Jaws of Life. Their heads turning left and right, left and right, left and right watching the train speed past them.

"Earl…" Randy looked down on his brother. "Where do you want me to plug this in?"

"Earl…" Cooley started hugging Earl as the last of the train vanished past them. "You saved my life! You saved my life! You didn't have to, but you saved my life!" He stood up again hugging him again. "I'm so sorry for trying to shoot you."

"Well," Earl looked to his brother and back to Cooley. "I just got my karma back. I couldn't go losing it again." The crossing stopped flashing and the bells stopped clanging as even train sounds died away as it vanished into the darkness. "Sorry bout your truck."

"That's okay…" Cooley jovially pumped Earl to the shoulder. "I insured it for three times its worth! I'm gonna get me one of those Humvees!"

"That'll do it…" Earl heard the crickets again now that everything calmed down. "Want a ride back to your place?"

"No," Cooley looked back up the way. "I think I'll walk it."

"Well… More power to you." Earl looked back to his brother with the Jaws of Life. "That's the last name on my list. Let's go home, Randy."

"Earl…" Randy was looking around. "Did you see a girl in a long red cape around here?"


	12. Chapter 12

12

On CNN, it was reported that twenty acres of wilderness had burned down, but when the authorities came to investigate, it was noticed that the area that burned had belonged to a wealthy Seattle real estate owner named Cooper Dawson. Even more suspicious was that Dawson's barn had burned up as well including its contents: almost five million dollars of packed and crated marijuana. When he was finally arrested, he was screaming that a blonde terrorist in a red cape had destroyed his property. Dawson's brother-in-law was the local sheriff who had helped him cover up his illegal activities, but now they were both possibly heading to prison. In Texas, a tractor-trailer carrying produce up Interstate 77 suddenly lost its cargo as its trailer was detached in mid-journey and carried skyward before it was dropped a hundred miles off the coast into the Gulf of Mexico. The truck was owned by the Gonzalez Shipping Company, a dummy company under the control of Juan Victor Robles, a Mexican drug load, who lost a billion dollars of street value cocaine. He tried getting it to his suppliers in another truck shipping automobile parts, but that shipment also mysteriously got launched. The following week, as he was trying to slip from Mexico to Colombia, his private plane was also just as mysteriously re-routed into the United States. The Federal Bureau of Investigations found it on the roof of the FBI headquarters in Albuquerque, New Mexico, its engines oddly gutted during mid-flight.

In Miami, an anonymous informant reported a shipment of drugs coming up through Key West. Five minutes after getting the news, the speedboats they were looking for were smashed and wrecked two miles in-land from the water in a hotel parking lot. Lt. Horatio Caine of the Miami Crime Lab arrived, looked at the two boats surrounded by crime tape with their illicit and spilled powdery cargo then up to the huge mangrove tree with eleven guys strung up by their underwear. Only three of them were still conscious. He looked up at the tree of drug-pushers, removed his sunglasses and said one thing.

"It looks like Christmas came early this year."

That same day in Palm Glade twenty-two miles away, Jim Longworth was chasing murder suspect David Lang. His girlfriend had been found murdered in her apartment, and Lang claimed he had found her like that, but evidence showed he had actually killed her. When he heard the police cars, Lang bailed out of his second floor apartment, ran down the alley and tried to make it to the highway. Longworth was just twenty feet away. He chased Lang over fences, through patios and around a hotel. As Lang was getting close to open space, a girl's arm in a blue sleeve came out nowhere from behind the hotel and clothes-lined him, knocking him out cold and dropping him like a sack of potatoes. Looking up dazed, Lang saw a beautiful blonde standing over him and disappearing and then Longworth coming up behind him and pulling out the handcuffs. Less than a minute later, Longworth's partner, Carlos Sanchez was on the scene.

"Did you have to clock him so hard?"

"I swear! I never touched him!" Longworth answered. "I came around the corner and he was just laying there!"

In Dandridge, Tennessee, a few days later, the state police was looking for Larry Darren Montgomery, a convicted killer who had escaped from the Allegheny State Penitentiary. He was wanted and dangerous. Three years ago, he had murdered his sister-in-law and nearly killed his father-in-law after his ex-wife won custody of his five-year-old daughter, Lizzie. Even his own friends knew him as a psychopath. Charles DuChamp and Ray Zancanelli of the U.S. Marshall's Office were following him in Tennessee when Montgomery's stolen car was found empty and abandoned on Interstate 36 with the driver's side door open, a fully loaded semi-automatic on the asphalt and several impacted bullet slugs scattered around it that looked as if they had been fired into solid steel. A few hours later, Montgomery was being taken down off the roof of the AT&T building, Nashville's highest structure where he had been found hanging upside down on by his underwear from a weather helicopter.

The following week, the cast of the syndicated Disney Channel hit comedy "So Random" was celebrating getting picked up for it's fifth season on TV. The celebration was a bit short-lived; after only two seasons with the show, its star, Sonny Munroe was moving on to her own singing and movie career. Over the summer, the cute brunette had starred in a movie with the Jonas Brothers, Mikayla and Hannah Montana. Her on-and-off again boyfriend, Chad Dylan Cooper, would be taking her place on the show; his own teenage drama series going off the air after eight seasons. Cast member Tawni Hart had opened her home in West Hollywood to celebrate their new season and Sonny's musical success. Her home was a ten-bedroom edifice on the mountainside off Mulholland Drive. Movie producer Harold Hecuba had built it in 1963, and actress Faith Fairlane had lived in it before she went bankrupt. She had her own in-door swimming pool and exercise studio plus the location from the back patio gave her a few of the entire Los Angeles skyline. The patio itself was something else. It was in three tiers, one on the ground near the garden and coy pond, the middle one twelve feet off the ground outside her bedroom and the top one thirty feet off the ground outside the dining room. The Random actors were going in and out enjoying the barbecue. Chad and Sonny were discussing where their relationship was going. Cast member Grady Mitchell was diving into his third set of spare ribs on the precarious back deck. The parents mostly mulled around inside talking and updating each other, but Zora Lancaster noticed something that bothered her. She had noticed the whole wooden tier shook a bit, but then she noticed there was a space in the threshold of the deck at the glass doors that swung open and closed over so often. The whole structure wasn't connected to the house. It tended to swing away from the structure about two inches and then back again. It wasn't attached to anything except the lumber posts. It was a potential accident waiting to happen.

"Tawni…" Zora coached her over. "This deck is about to come down." Her vacuous blonde cast member noticed the gap open and close.

"Zora…" The blonde one giggled a bit. "It's been doing that for months." She paused. "Look, I dance to Katy Perry out here. If it was going to come down, it would have come down already."

"Okay…." Zora had counted Sonny, Chad, Grady, Tawni, Mikayla and herself on it. "But there's six people on it now!"

"Trust me…" Tawni tossed her hair a bit. "This thing would support an elephant!" She shimmied a little dance, the gap formed a lot wider and something snapped loose underneath. A piece of support broke off and fell to the ground as the whole platform slid outward and sideways. Mikayla jumped in to the house just as the gap became two feet and widened to three feet. Sonny screamed and grabbed the corner post to keep from falling off. Chad's fingers dug unto a floor beam, and Grady watched the barbecue start rolling off the edge, breaking through the railing and falling the thirty feet to the rock garden. Connie Munroe heard her daughter screaming and looked out, then raced to where the patio doors once lead somewhere. Seven feet out, tethered only by the electrical line to the patio lights, four kids held on for their lives. Under them, the back yard descended and instead of having a thirty-foot drop they were hanging over a fifty-foot drop. Zora's father, Ed Lancaster, and Grady's father, Matt, pulled Zora in off the edge of the house. Mikayla's mother, Tricia Roarke, doted over her daughter just barely making it to safety. Five parents stood by shocked as their four teenage children clung for their lives to a section of wooden patio kept from falling by heavy industrial electrical wire secured to the back wall by a series of tiny steel clasps. Sonny was screaming her head off as she hugged the corner post. Grady stood on one post and held on to the next. Chad was between them holding on by his fingertips with his feet on another post. Tawni tried to descend down to her bedroom deck, but the steps gave up under her. Ed tried to reach Chad closest to him, but the distance was two feet too far. Mikayla found a long extension cord and tried using it as a lifeline.

"Chad, grab this!" She threw the end out to him. "Try to reach, Sonny!"

"What about me!" Tawni and Grady called out.

"Sonny!" Chad grabbed the end of the orange extension cord in his right hand and tried scooting toward her. "Grab my hand! I won't let you fall!"

"I can't do it." Sonny was terrified. There was nothing under her feet. She was hugging and clutching the southwest corner post and dangling off the end over empty space.

"I called 911." Tami Hart announced.  
"Sonny!" Connie Munroe screamed at her daughter. "Open your eyes and reach for Chad!"

"I can't!" She held on petrified as everyone screamed at her. On the next property, actress Alex Young lived in the former home of the late Seventies actress Jennifer Farrell. Hearing the screams, she went out on her patio and watched in useless shock to see the dangling off the wafting wood patio. She felt scared for them as she called 911 herself. The electrical cord could snap or break loose of the house. Unable to do anything else, Sonny screamed out louder than before.

Twenty-five miles away in front of her local Hill's grocery store, Bridget's head cocked westward to the sound. She had one bag, and Leonard who she had met inside had her other bag. She looked at him, placed her free hand to her chest where she wore her costume under her blouse and looked around looking for a distraction.

"This was fun…" All Leonard heard was the sounds of traffic and the rare distant police siren. "We ought to shop together more often. It's like we were married or something…"

"Yeah…" Bridget looked distracted. She noticed the shoe store next door. "Oh my god! I love those running shoes in the window!" She forced her bag into Leonard's other arm. "Leonard, be a sweetie and take these back for me! I've just GOT to buy them!"

"What? Now?" Leonard jostled the two bags.

"I'll make it up to you!" She kissed him on the lips and dashed inside. Feeling her lips on his, Leonard felt a bit of manhood stirring and swapped confusion for chivalry.

"No problem!" He answered and started heading back to his building. Over his head, something split the sky asunder. It sounded as if a cannon had been fired. He stopped, looked around and shrugged it off as he continued looking forward to that favor. In West Hollywood, Chad was reaching for Sonny. All she had to do was open her eyes.

"Sonny!" He reached for her. "I can reach you! Just open your eyes!"

"Chad…" Sonny opened her terrified eyes. She looked at Chad close to her and clenched the wood post tighter. She tried reaching him with her left arm.

"No, your other arm!"

Driving on US 101, police sketch artist Jim Powell and Dr. Alan Harper were two car lengths apart when something put a dent in the corner of the sign for the US 170 off-ramp, clipping the whole thing hard enough that it vibrated. It was more than a dent; it was folded over backward.

"Sonny…" Chad realized her loved her. "Please… just slowly give me your hand…" Sonny looked to her mother briefly, reaffirmed her grasp on the pole with her left arm and slowly unfurled her right hand just as the one clap holding the electrical line from extending more suddenly snapped off the house. The whole back deck lurched suddenly, Tawni screamed and Grady found himself sliding off with just his arm holding on to his post. Mikayla noticed a shape speeding through the trees toward them. Sonny suddenly felt herself fall five feet and get caught by something. She looked over her right shoulder and saw… her! It was her! She was blonde, beautiful and… there was just something about her. A presence… a presence as if she was looking into the face of a god, a goddess… clad in a blue costume and a red cape who could fly and come to the rescue for people all over the world; she was being saved by her! Bridget held the collapsing wood deck with one hand, her left arm wrapped around Sonny's waist to hold her up. Sonny dreamily looked at Bridget then down to her feet dangling fifty feet off the ground. What was holding them up? Bridget started pushing the two tons of wood back into place and lifted Sonny back on to it.

"You've got two seconds then I'm letting go!" She announced. Chad didn't look twice. He quickly crawled side by side with Sonny back into the house. Grady heaved himself up and Tawni lifted her leg back on to the deck. Zora grabbed her cell phone for a photo opportunity and all the concerned parents grabbed up their young TV stars back to safety. When they looked back, the electrical lights on the deck were pulled off the entire platform swinging backward and shattering across the entire back yard into a wide perimeter of shattered and splintered wood. Only the flooring remained intact, but the impact drove the nails up from underneath. Nico looked out over the pattern of carnage and searched the skies for the missing superhero.

"Damn, was she hot!" He sounded off.

"I was this close!" Chad felt his mother clinging to him. "This close to her!"

"Pictures? Who got pictures?" Grady looked at Mikayla's cell phone. It was just a blondish, bluish blur engulfing Sonny. Zora only got a blur.

"I've got to play her in a sketch!" Tawni was plotting. "If she looks that hot in that outfit, imagine how I'll look in it!"

Back in Pasadena, Bridget descended secretly down through alleyways quickly levitating down to ground level behind her apartment building, mentally unlocking the unused back door below ground level and reentering her apartment house in secret. Her clairvoyance told her no one was using the laundry room, and she did have laundry in the dryer left drying before her trip to the store. For five minutes, the security camera in the room shut off and failed to record. Taking her basket, she stripped down to her dainties, looking behind her constantly, pulling on shorts and a top then dumping her laundry over her costume to cover it from view. She then casually took her time up the stairs in her bare feet to her apartment on the fourth floor. As she reached the second floor, Leonard entered the building. She stayed just one floor ahead of him. He turned on to the second floor as she reached the third. On the fourth floor, she telekinetically unlocked her apartment door and carried her laundry inside, setting it on the sofa and then heard Leonard. He was right behind her! She could not let him catch her back here ahead of him! She backed up behind her open door and pulled it back over her to conceal herself.

Leonard stood looking at her open door.

"Hello," He tired jostled the two bags. "Is someone here?" Why was the door hanging open? He had seen Penny lock it when he offered to help her do her shopping. He walked in glancing at the laundry basket and headed toward the counter to relieve the weight in his arms, placing the two bags of groceries on the counter. Behind him, the person he knew as Penny Parker tried sneaking into her bedroom, then dived behind her sofa as Leonard turned around to look around the apartment. The place did not look burglarized. Scowling a bit confused, he casually took a Pepsi from her refrigerator and started to pass the sofa as Bridget crawled past him unseen for the hallway. She found a checker piece on the floor. Peeking carefully at him, she turned and hurled the piece into her kitchen. It sounded like a loud pop as it bounced off the wood cabinet and ricocheted off the wall. When Leonard heard the loud pop, he turned around and looked for the sound he heard as Penny scrambled on her hands and knees into the hallway. When Leonard turned back toward that sound, his swaying arm hit the laundry basket and turned it over to the floor.

"Oh, crap…" He started picking up her clothes and tossing them into the basket. A second smirk at her panties, a funny grin at her bra, he tossed it all back together barely paying attention to the first red stocking boot wrapped inside a pair of blue jeans or the inside out blue leotard, but when he got to the red sheet shaped like a flowing red cape with the yellow Superman insignia, his attention was piqued.

"Hey, Leonard…" Bridget pretended to casually walk in behind him. "I decided that I…" She saw him with her cape!

"What this?"

"That?" Bridget started mulling over hundreds of excuses. Movie role? Superhero fetish? "Uh… that's, uh,…"

"Penny, are you Super…"

"Happy Birthday!" Bridget suddenly announced. "You sneaky little scamp! You found your birthday present!" She started grinning excitedly.

"What?" He reacted confused. "My birthday isn't till next month!"

"I know that!" She playfully punched his shoulder. "I just got it yesterday, and it smelled a bit funny from the packaging so I washed it." She paused nodding uncontrollably. "Apparently, it's the one whatsername wore in that movie!"

"Helen Slater?" Leonard checked it out. "This is one of the seventeen capes Helen Slater wore in the 1984 movie "Supergirl?"" He seemed to be buying it. Bridget recaught her breath. "Wow! This is incredible!"

"Yeah!"

"Where's the document of authenticity?"

"The what?" Bridget got worried again.

"The document of authenticity?" Leonard responded. "You know, the paperwork and photos that say it's the real thing."

"Uh, there wasn't any." Bridget answered as she pulled her hair back.

"Ohhhh…" Leonard sounded depressed. "Penny, without it, it's possibly fake. You know, with all the sightings, there are a lot of fake Supergirl props going around."

"But I paid five hundred dollars for it." Bridget would rather sound ashamed than have her secret out.

"Well, there you go…" Leonard instructed her. "The real ones go for up to eighteen sometimes twenty-five thousand dollars!" He explained. Bridget acted embarrassed to perpetuate her act. "But it's the thought that counts…"

"Yeah, sorry, sweetie…" She rubbed his arm to perpetuate her lie.

"Don't worry about it. It's still pretty cool." He noticed her in her shapely shorts and tank top then started out. "Sorry about your laundry…"

"Don't worry about it." Bridget started picking up what was left on the floor. In her mind, she realized just how close she had come to having her identity revealed. If her leotard was the right way out or if her red skirt was more obvious, it would have been harder to explain. Enjoying his gift, Leonard realized something else.

"Wait a second," He turned around at the door. "Weren't you wearing a blouse and…" Bridget suddenly grabbed him and closed her lips over his. She wrapped her arms over his shoulders, held her body against him and stole his breath away. Smelling the heavenly scent of roses and cinnamon, Leonard felt his mind slipping away….

"Never mind…." He grinned goofily, turned around and walked into the doorframe, bouncing off of it then continuing on his way back to his place. Bridget gave him a sweet grin as she closed her door.

"Our daughters will be smart and beautiful…" Leonard dreamed. Bridget just caught her breath again, picked up her cell phone from the table where she had left it before the store and scrolled through her contacts. She tapped the number for friends she knew in Boston as her free hand picked up the last few pieces of her laundry from the floor.

"Hello, Hey, Tabitha… it's me, Bridget…" Bridget knew these witches as relatives of Sabrina's. "Um, do you recall how your mother said she could make me a costume immune to high velocities? How about a cape? Can I get a whole new costume with that?"

In Detroit, Leonard's future mother-in-law was home alone except for Kerry upstairs. Paul was in Chicago for the newspaper, her father was at the park, CJ was in school and Rory was back in college promising to stay away from substance abuse. As she paid the bills and balanced her checkbook in the dining room, she heard the doorbell and left the quiet solitude to answer her front door. She hopped on to the front landing and opened the door.

"Hi, Mrs. Hennessey…" A squeaky preppy voice responded.

"Nikki…" Cate knew this girl. Bridget had gone to school with her. "Nikki Alcott… How are you doing?"

"I'm doing great!" The cute brunette answered. "I'm in my last year at the University of Michigan with a major in communications and a minor in clothing design." She noticed movement behind Cate in the house. Kerry had come down for her room and headed straight for the computer in the living room.

"Hi Kerry!"

"Hello, Nikki…" Kerry responded deflated. It may have been five years since she last saw Nikki, but it might as well had been yesterday. She rolled her eyes away to show her distaste for the little diva and plugged her flash drive into the computer.

"Anyway, Mrs. Hennessey, "Nikki continued. "I'm going around trying to collect donations for the St. Jude Children's Hospital. Whichever sorority at my college collects the most gets an all expense paid trip to Venice courtesy of the college. Can I put you down for something?"

"I guess I can spare something." Cate looked around for her purse. Kerry just rolled her eyes. If Bridget were here, she'd be accusing Nikki of caring more about the trip than the charity. She watched her mother take a twenty-dollar bill from her purse for the college girl's charity and turned back to stuff it in the girl's can.

"Only twenty dollars, Mrs. Hennessey?" Nikki looked up disheartened. "Mrs. Bundy gave fifty bucks."

"Mrs. Bundy married and buried three husbands who left her large inheritances…" Cate pointed out. "Nikki, this is a working household."

"I really think Bridget would have wanted you to give more." Nikki tried the sympathy card. If Kerry's look of disgust were any louder, the girl would have heard it. She continued typing at the computer.

"Bridget isn't dead." Cate pointed out.

"That's right… Keep hoping out for the best!" Nikki cheered her on. "She's out there somewhere! She's got to be still alive! I mean, just because most girls who have been missing for more than a year turn up dead, it doesn't mean Bridget is among them."

"Look…" Cate was losing her patience and was seeing this girl just how Bridget saw her. "Bridget is not dead. She's still alive somewhere out there. She's still got a college scholarship waiting for her. Paul's boss is offering a two hundred thousand dollar award for anyone who knows where she is. Miss Kent offered twenty-five thousand dollars for Bridget's safe return."

Kerry's attention suddenly piqued.

"Wow…" Nikki felt humbled. "That's practically a quarter of a million dollars… I'd sure like to find Bridget if I thought I could get that money."

"Wait…" Kerry came off the computer and came around to the front door with her mother. "What about Miss Kent?"

"Miss Kent offered twenty-five thousand dollars for Bridget's safe return." Cate repeated. Even though she heard it again, Kerry refused to believe it. The offer of a reward did not change her theory that Bridget and Miss Kent were one and the same. It just further continued the devious nature her sister went through to cover up her secret identity.

"Oh-my-God!" The crimson-haired beauty turned away screeching in disbelief.

"Good luck, Nikki, with your charity…" Cate said good-bye to the girl and closed the front door. She turned to Kerry confused and surprised with her arms open wide and looking for an explanation for her daughter's weird outburst. "What?"

"I can't believe this…" Kerry paced back and forth at the bottom of the stairs. "Mom… I don't know how to say this, but…" Kerry gasped delicately, blinked her eyes and contemplated what she was about to say. She had chosen not to share this, but now, she thought she had to say what she suspected. "I think Bridget was also… Miss Kent."

"What?" Cate didn't know what she was saying. She thought back to meeting the British heiress. She was beautiful, brunette, mature and very aristocratic. She could still picture her standing there at the banquet sipping champagne with that long black dress… the same one Bridget had wore the night of the Lion's Club Banquet. "No…. no… Kerry, that's ridiculous. I met Miss Kent at the banquet. Bridget and Miss Kent were there at the same time!"

"Were they, mom?" Kerry scoffed at her mother's conviction that Bridget wasn't devious. "Were they really?"

"Miss Kent is worth several million dollars! Where would Bridget get that kind of…" She flashed back on the money that Paul had found five years before. There had been a tin of twenties and fifties in the forgotten cabinet over the refrigerator. She thought she had just put it there herself and had forgotten it, but then after Bridget had vanished, another tin with nearly the same amount had turned up in the back of the linen closet and then another in the rafters of the garage after CJ had nearly burned it down trying to deep fry the Thanksgiving turkey. If Bridget did have all those powers, maybe she figured out how to make money from them.

"Oh my freaking god!" She saw the light. "You've got to be kidding me!" She screamed. Kerry just stood where she was with her arms crossed and a big knowing Cheshire grin.

"Bridget has been missing for five years, and yet, she's still playing us." Smiling, she was slowly but surely getting her mother to her side.

"Oh my god!" Cate dropped and sat with her head in her hands at the base of the stairs. It wasn't possible. It just wasn't possible. Her own little girl… someone she had loved and raised and took care of could deceive her. Her mouth hanging open, she looked at Kerry completely stunned and yet completely violated.

"When I finally get my hands on that girl…" She looked to Kerry. "Look, don't tell your father about this. Not grandpa, not Rory, not even…."

"The man of the house is home…" CJ came through the front door. White shirt, blue slacks with a black tie, he loved his job as a high school teacher, but he also loved getting out of that place as fast as possible. "Look, I've got a date tonight with a girl I met at the library… and we all know what library girls like." Chuckling, he started making a weird noise then got suspicious. Cate had drawn silent. Kerry was acting as if she were distracted.

"What's going on?" He asked. Cate suddenly rose and crossed over to the kitchen; Kerry returned to typing at the computer.

"The family secret?" He deduced it. He paced a bit trying to figure it out. Cate started setting out stuff to make dinner; Kerry was engrossed in her law firm's paper work. Ascending the stairs, CJ stopped on the middle landing and posed as if he was about to quote Shakespeare.

"I will solve this riddle if it takes the lives of everyone in this house!"


	13. Chapter 13

13

"CJ is an idiot." Jim Eagan told his daughter. "He's not going to discover the truth about Bridget, so, don't worry about it."

"I don't know, dad." Cate talked as she drove her father to refill his prescription at the local Walgreen's. "He's getting sneaky. He's sneaking through the house listening in on conversations." She made the turn on to Main Street. "I was talking to Paul in Chicago when he picked up the extension."

"And what did he get…" Jim saw the Walgreen's coming up. "A few things about the water bill, work and the bald patch where the tree used to be." He shook his head and felt the bump into the parking lot. "I swear. I bet Bridget could come up behind him and all he'd want would be her autograph." The car pulled into a space. "Cate, I'm telling you. Don't obsess over it. Let CJ tire himself out running around in circles." He popped his seat belt and opened his door, sending his cane out first to support him.

"If you say so, dad…" Cate waited for him and helped him through the door of the pharmacy as she looked for her shopping list. Her father had taken two steps and had stopped. She looked up herself and discovered the location being robbed. Two guys with guns were holding the two clerks behind the counter at gunpoint. The taller guy had a Dirty Harry special, a Colt 35 revolver. His shorter partner had a sawed off shotgun.

"I thought I told you to lock the door!" The bigger gunman waved his revolver at their new hostages.

"I thought I did!"

"Don't mind us!" Cate flashed a smile. "We'll just be going…"

"You're going no where!" Eugene DiPaolo had been out of prison for eight months. Unable to get a job because of his record, he reverted to bad habit of stealing money and drugs and leaving no witnesses alive. He grabbed Cate by the arm and pulled her hard into the store. Getting over his shock of the discovery, Jim reacted.

"Hey, that's my daughter there!" He raised his cane. "You little punk…" He tried swatting the younger felon. DiPaolo might have been his size and younger, but Eagan recalled being a police officer and an army sergeant. DiPaolo grabbed Jim's cane and threatened to shoot him. Cate screamed as fat and pudgy Danny Loekle held her restrained and pulled her backward.

"Dad! Don't…" Cate was terrified. She was pushed to the floor hard with Mr. Harding, the manager, and Mrs. Bonaduce, a local resident on the floor with their hands over their heads. Daisy Loftus, the cashier, had gone to school with Rory. She was crying. DiPaolo had told them that no one was going to survive.

"Don't worry, Catey," Her father looked annoyed. "I can take this punk."

"Really?" DiPaolo heard Cate crying. "Then you're going first." He raised his gun and squeezed the trigger as more than the gun exploded. The electronic doors before him came crashing down and the potato chip display went flying across the room. Jim and Eugene suddenly saw a third person standing between them. Dressed in her brand new dark blue, red and white costume with the longer cape, Bridget palmed the bullet from the gun in the palm of her hand grinning; her eyes narrowed to narrow slits. Just a few feet behind her beyond the snack aisle, her own mother was speechless.

"Holy Mary Mother of God!" Jim looked right into his granddaughter's eyes and realized just how close he had come. She had snatched the bullet right out of the gun!

"Hi, pudding…" Bridget spoke to DiPaolo. "Wanna learn how to fly?"

"I'm out." Loekle suddenly turned smart, dropped his shotgun and ran for it.

"Bridge…" Cate barely spoke and ducked as her daughter grabbed DiPaolo and flung him across the store. He sailed over the paper towels, through the glass door of the beer cooler and pushed them through to the other side as broken glass went everywhere. Falling bottles and tiny shards of glass rained around Harding, his employee and customers as they hid behind the snack shelves before the drink cabinets. It was going to take a lot of insurance to clean up this mess, but at least everyone was alive and someone was going back to prison. Trying to proudly thank his granddaughter, Jim saw her racing for the doorway.

"Catey!" He couldn't believe it. Her power, her presence, her conviction… "Did you see? Did you see?"

"Don't let her get away!" Cate fought off seeing the spectacle and helped Mr. Harding. Loekle was getting away. Uninterested in going back to jail himself, he jumped into a parked ice cream truck at the end of the block and pushed out the ice cream guy to the kids waving money. He saw Bridget in the mirror coming after him and hit the gas pedal. Automobiles stopped and people in the parking lot and at the garage watched as Bridget grabbed hold of the back of the moving white truck. She had the bumper and started lifting as the weight of it cracked through it. Loekle started racing the engine as he looked at her and started racing through the parking lot. Trudy Borland and her son, Junior, were just about to enter the Food Lion market, when they saw balding and portly Loekle coming straight at her. He looked up at just the last moment.

"Trudy!" Local Detroit TV personality Al Borland was at the gas station when he saw the girl in the Supergirl outfit try stopping the ice cream truck only to have it break free of her. Since his days as a "Tool Time" sidekick, Al had become a success hosting his own TV Series for History Channel, but he'd give it all up to just find his wife and son still alive. Amidst the excited spectators rushing to the scene, he raced to get to his family as Cate raced the length of block to the scene to confront her daughter in person. The kids wanting ice cream now wanted autographs of the beautiful blond superhero. Witnesses were trying to get photos or film footage. In front of the market, Al found his wife and son alive! Somehow, the front of the ice cream truck had bent around… something. As Loekle moaned delirious after smashing his head to the interior, the front grillwork and body of the ice cream truck had shaped around something that had stopped them. Cate ran through the people at the scene.

"She saved us, Al." Trudy confessed to her husband. "She shielded Al Jr. and I with her body!"

"Where'd she go?" Cate looked around. Trudy pointed up to the heavens. Cate swung around and noticed her daughter several feet above her and getting further and further away.

"Get your ass back here, young lady!" Cate screamed dropping to her feet. "Come back…." She heard the police cars coming. There was an ambulance somewhere beyond them. "So close…" She opined as people snapped photos on cell phones, congratulated Al or posed with the ice cream truck. "I was so close…" Cate drifted back into depression.

Somewhere, Bridget wanted to be with her too. She tried to fight back her own tears….

Beyond Highland Park, there was a neighborhood of neat and tidy homes, which belonged to upper middle class residents. The stone statue of a red and white horse jockey rest at the end of a driveway with a BMW parked in it. Another house had a wraparound porch with a swing. Nikki Alcott skipped down from the Victorian black and white.

"Thank you for the donation, Mrs. Gardner." She told her neighbor. "I'll try to think of you if we win the trip to Venice." She skipped down the walkway and out to the sidewalk. The next neighbor had a high hedge. Parked in front of it was a black van, but Nikki barely looked it over. It had muddy wheels and an out of state license plate. As she passed by it, the driver came around to meet her.

"Excuse me," He looked young and cute and showed her a road map. "Can you show me how to get back to I-90?"

"Man, are you lost!" Nikki looked around. "Okay, let's see…" She saw his gun under the map as the van opened up. Another guy clamped his hand over her mouth and pulled her in; the first guy lifting her legs up and hoisting her inside before slamming the door shut. The donation can had rolled off the curb and under the van. Kicking and fighting, Nikki tried to scream. A hypodermic passed over through her vision as they quickly drugged her to control her. With her heart racing, it was almost instantaneous. She struggled a bit more and felt her head fading away. She wanted to sleep.

"They're a lot more easier to control when they're juiced." The driver got back behind the wheel and started the engine.

"Remember the route." His partner covered Nikki with a tarp. "We ditch the van and switch to the truck."

"Right…" The driver started driving through the crossing as the car suddenly lurched to a stop. The back wheels were screeching on the asphalt, the engine was roaring but they weren't moving. Were they caught on something? He started getting out then fell forward into the dashboard. The back end was lifting up, his partner crashed into the dashboard as the vehicle stood up on its grill and their abduction victim fell across the backs of the seats unconscious. After getting turned up, the driver looked down through the windshield and saw them passing over the tops of electrical lines, trees and houses. They were moving fast through the air. What was going on here? The engine had cut out. They struggled and fought to right themselves. Was a helicopter or something towing them? Far under them, people looked up at them, geometrical shapes of buildings passed away to roads and highways and then gave way to the shoreline and open water.

"What's going on?" They were screaming. "What's going on?" The back end above them popped open.

"Hi, boys…" Holding on to the back bumper by the chassis, Bridget grinned at them over the lake. "I'm sorry, but my friend just ate, she can't go swimming with you."

"What?"

"Don't do it! Don't do it!" The driver searched for his gun in the loose trash that had fallen forward.

"Say hello to the sharks for me." Bridget grabbed Nikki's unconscious body by her Gucci belt and let the van fall down from around her. Her screaming abductors felt zero gravity for a minute and then freefall as the vehicle hit the water at twenty miles an hour, rolled sideways then started filling with water. High above, Bridget carried Nikki over her shoulder back to the Oakdale neighborhood near Highland Park. Recognizing the homes and streets, she descended down over Cheatum Drive, looking back several times in case her old rival woke up and recognized her. The brunette diva lived with her family in the large blue Federal edifice with the white shutters, upstairs balcony and Dorian columns with the wrap around porch. Bridget's red boot touched the concrete of the walkway and carried her forward with Nikki in her arms to the porch swing. Quietly laying her down, Bridget silently kept checking to make sure she wasn't going to wake up. She checked her pulse, tucked the donation tin with an extra $100 bill in it under Nikki's arm and palmed her hair from her face before turning around to leave.

Delirious and addled from the drugs in her, Nikki opened her eyes and looked up. She saw the tall blonde figure of a person heading away from her in a red cape with the yellow "Superman" crest off their shoulders. She never saw a face. Her mind was struggling against the drugs in her system. The figure turned down off her porch and just alighted off the bottom step into the air. There was no jump, nor a running start. The blonde one just alighted and vanished into the sky. Her mind fighting to stay awake, Nikki tilted her head back as her thoughts swam around and played games with her senses.

"Did I jas' get reshcued by Reesch' Widderspoon?" She mumbled incoherently.


	14. Chapter 14

14

"WDTV Channel 2 News, this is Peter MacNichol reporting from Detroit…" The TV anchorman reported. "After seventeen years, Detroit police officers have finally arrested Dennis Oliver Patrick and James Oliver Karlen in Lake Saint Clair off Grosse Point after a nationwide search for the two men. The two men have been wanted since the 1995 murder of eighteen-year-old Detroit student Haylie Reynolds whose body was found in a Chicago storage facility just last year."

Camera footage showed the two men dripping wet being taken into police custody near St. Claire Lake.

"The two men are also believed part of an underground East Coast sex slavery ring and linked to at least fifty-three disappearances of young girls across the Midwest. The FBI believes their arrest could lead to the complete destruction of the ring and possibly solve the whereabouts of countless other girls who vanished, like nineteen year old Bridget Hennessy who vanished November 5, 2005 from Detroit."

The only image they could find of Bridget was a bad picture scanned from her yearbook where Bridget was dressed as a witch for Halloween 1989.

"The men were picked up by the Wayne County Rescue Squad floating on their black Ford van about two miles off shore, but police have refused to answer questions on just how their van ended up so far off shore. A police spokesman claims they drove off a ferry, but several witnesses describe a figure in a red cape floating in the area. Local cameraman Randy Taylor believes he knows the real answer."

"I saw her off Lakeshore Road." Randy was the son of former Detroit TV celebrity, Tim "The Tool-Man" Taylor. He was now a young filmmaker who dabbled in videotaping parties and galas for expensive companies. "I was driving this way…" He gestured the way. "And coming overhead like this, I saw what I thought was a UFO, so I grabbed my video recorder and started filming it, but when I zoomed in on it, I recognized it as an old 1993 Ford Econoline van being carried by its back bumper between ninety and a hundred miles an hour. It went out there and then suddenly dropped. Meanwhile, coming back was this red and blue, maybe violet, form carrying something dark on top of it."

The news played his footage. WDTV-News had purchased the rights to run it for $2,000 but Randy retained the copyright to all images from it. In it, it revealed a small grainy shape flying over two hundred…. maybe three hundred feet, over the highway. It was shaped like a living person, a red shape popping in and out it as it flapped but it never came in completely clear. It looked as if Randy had tried focusing closer and closer, but whatever this figure was, it could distort the air around it. At its closet to the camera, it couldn't be more than a hundred and fifty feet, but it just looked like a large flying glob.

"As most Detroit natives remember, " MacNichol continued. "Between September 2005 and March 2006, there was a rash of so-called Supergirl sightings in the area, around 1,270 in all. Local actress Amber Tisdale would claim credit for the sightings, but was later discredited when she herself had to be rescued by the mysterious heroine. In other news…."

The footage by Randy Taylor went back and forth. It looked as if the famous flying blonde was drunk and floating back and forth on a wire.

"Dude, stop playing with the rewind button!" Raj chastised Howard for playing with the recording.

"Okay, see that…" Howard paused the image on his laptop. "Now, I used a reverse algorithm to undo the distortion around the image, applied spatial software to enhance it and then ran it through a color correction software to re-separate and sharpen the colors… Now, voila! What do you think?"

Raj and Leonard looked at it. It was a closer more enhanced image of the same, but now, it just looked painted over. Leonard looked the image over and sat back again. The guys didn't know what he wanted to hear. It was the same image, but it had been manipulated into a cartoon figure.

"Come on!" Howard was adamantly convinced. "It's Penny! It's as obvious as the nose on your face. You can't deny that shapely figure belongs to anyone else."

"She just looks like Reese Witherspoon to me." Raj answered.

"Howard, give it up…" Leonard stood and lifted himself out of the chair. "You've got to get off this whole "Penny is Supergirl" thing. It's nothing but a sick fantasy with you."

"I agree with Leonard." Sheldon spoke up. "If Penny had the power to fly and do everything she does, I'd know it immediately. There is no way she'd be able to hide a secret identity from me. My brain would deduce it immediately."

"Look…" Leonard sighed as he tossed his empty soda can in the recycling bin under the counter then turned to pull another soda from the refrigerator. "Penny works ten hour shifts at the Cheesecake Factory, she goes on auditions trying to become an actress, she spends time with us, she goes on dates… Meanwhile, Supergirl is seen constantly practically twenty-four/seven. When would she have the time?"

"Well, if you put it like that…" Howard sighed a bit and closed his laptop. "Where is Penny now?"

"She's at an audition for a play in Santa Monica."

In the tiny community of Santa Monica, North Carolina, it had been raining nearly constant for three weeks and the creeks were swelling. Residents were in danger of losing their homes as water encroached their backyards. The National Guard was advising people to leave their homes, but several people stayed put where they were thinking they were safe. As the Little Tennessee River rose and Fontana Lake swelled, it was likely it was going to cover up the towns of Santa Monica, Cypress Springs, Hope Springs and the rest down toward Franklin. Flying through the torrent, Bridget scanned the area from several perspectives then attacked the old limestone pit outside nearby Blair Township. The quarry had closed down in 1987, but they had left a nearly hundred foot long chunk cut out of a piece of the local hill. Breaking it at the crest in several places, she broke off a chunk of the limestone underneath as if it was a giant slice of bread and as it started coming down, she moved the huge chunk of limestone over to the Little Tennessee to briefly reroute a portion of the flood into another direction back the way she had come, turning the two hundred foot deep and one mile wide limestone pit into a small lake. When the rain finally seceded the following day, local businessmen purchased the old limestone quarry to build a fishing lodge by it.

In the following few days, the guys started seeing strange coincidences and nuances that seemed just a bit odd. In Germany, the following week, there was an explosion in an industrial plant without any fatalities. Workmen reported seeing a girl in a red cape holding up a chunk of the collapsing roof as employees ran for safety. In Pasadena the next day, Leonard noticed the girl he knew as Penny Parker had a craving for sauerkraut hot dogs. When an abducted French girl near Marseilles turned up claiming a beautiful flying woman in a red cape had rescued her, Sheldon noticed Penny was wearing expensive French boots to pick up her mail. After missing Canadian fugitive Tomas Duquesne was found hanging by his underwear off the chapel of a church in Mexico City, Rajesh noticed Penny sitting and reading a novel in a Mexican restaurant as she ate her lunch. There were all little observations, possibly coincidences. As Leonard had pointed out, Penny did not have the time to possibly have one identity much less two. Howard was meanwhile trying to keep up with all the appearances of the blonde one in the cape on his website. Her flight patterns were all over the place. Her costumes did not stay constant. It was navy blue to dark blue. The symbol on her chest was red on yellow, red on white, red on blue and back to red on yellow with a black border. It was across her chest, to the side off a plunging neckline or it was part of an elaborate pattern with her cape. Witnesses continued to compare her resemblance to famous actresses and female celebrities, particularly Reese Witherspoon, but other witnesses with less than direct glimpses of her said she resembled singer Carrie Underwood, a taller Ashley Tisdale, a blonde Mila Kunis, a younger blonder thinner Kelly Clarkson, a sexed-up version of Kellie Picker, Jessica Simpson with blue eyes, Gwen Stefani in a padded bra or Lady Gaga as a normal blonde. Howard started wondering just how many versions of the Kryptonian goddess he was going to get in the inconsistent accounts. Justin Russo of Waverly Place, New York took that idea a bit further. On his _Supergirl Shrine_ website, he posted a blog about the possibility that there were several Supergirls because it was a phenomenon that affected random blonde girls in the proximity of certain emergencies and criminal accounts. Off that blog, he and Howard then got into a spirited and lively video Internet debate highlighted by Justin's animated histrionics and Howard's cocky hand gestures.

"How dare you tell me I don't know what I'm talking about?" Justin yelled into his laptop in New York.

"I can because you don't know what you're talking about." Howard smirked back at him through the computer in his bedroom at home in California. "Look, there's only one Supergirl because when she first started appearing, all her appearances were in Detroit…"

"And that's where the phenomenon started…" Justin disagreed. "But if you take in all her various faces and costumes reported in the media…"

"Various faces and costumes?" Howard scoffed. "You're basing your hypothesis on the misidentification of distracted witnesses…"

"They're not misidentifications!" Justin's voice rose. "Look, I happen to know a bit about…" He started picking his words carefully. "Paranormal activity, and I'm telling you…"

"Paranormal activity?" Howard started chuckling. "I work at CalTech. I've done work for NASA, and there's no evidence that the paranormal even exists! Supergirl is about as paranormal as the white stuff in Oreo cookies." Howard ate the top off an Oreo cookie and sipped some milk at his computer.

"Howard!" A woman's shrill voice screamed behind him. "Who are you talking to?"

"Nobody, ma!" Howard yelled off screen. "Now stop screaming, I'm on my computer!"

"Would you like some more milk?"

"Yes, please!"

"You still live with your mother?" Justin couldn't stop chuckling. "What are you? Forty or something?"

"She lives with me!"

"Hey guys…" Phil Diffy entered the live video chat on his laptop in Pickford, Illinois. "If I may, you guys have both made several valid points, but if I may point out…" A very beautiful blonde came up behind him in his chair.

"Whoa, whoa…." Howard felt a stirring in his hormones. "Diffy, who is that incredible beautiful goddess with you?"

"That's Keely, my girlfriend…" Phil answered.

"Hello…" Keely waved to the faces in Phil's laptop. Both Howard and Justin started picking up and shifting through their Supergirl photos with them. Justin thought he had seen her face somewhere else. Howard was downloading her image to facial comparison software.

"I'm not Supergirl!" Keely realized what they were doing.

"You guys are jerks!" Phil logged out of the video feed.

"No, no… don't go!" Howard opined the chance to see her. "Crap…"

"Look, Howard…" Justin felt a bit deflated. "I'm just saying there has to be something behind the numerous variations of her face and costume in the media. Maybe it's not all one girl…."

"I disagree." Howard continued. "The majority of the sightings are remarkably consistent. A tall beautiful girl of extraordinary presence with a slight resemblance to Reese Witherspoon…."

"Justin…" Another girl appeared in Justin's video feed. "Mom says it's your turn to sweep the shop."

"Who, whoa, whoa…" Howard lit up again. "And who is this shapely brunette vixen I see before me?"

"This is my sister, Alex." Justin rolled his eyes. "Alex, Howard; Howard, Alex…"

"Alex…" Howard tried to sound charming. "So… do you have a boyfriend?" He started downloading her image to a different image collection.

"Yes, and I'm eighteen!"

"Even better…" Howard shined. "You know, I'm going to be in New York for the Science Fiction Convention next month. Would you like to…"

"Dude, this is my sister!" Justin watched his sister walk out of his room. "Justin Russo, out!" He severed the video collection. Howard watched as others started logging off the feed. Bud Bundy from Chicago, Matt McGuire from Los Angeles, Eddie Thomas from San Francisco, Rory Gilmore of Connecticut, Zack Martin from the S.S. Tipton docked in Seattle, Washington, Andy Harridge from Chicago, Derek Venturi of Toronto, actor Chad Dylan Cooper from Hollywood, Jackson Stewart and Lily Truscott of Malibu, Kerry Hennessey of Detroit…

"What?" Howard logged himself out. "It's not like I rubbed myself against her something." He sipped his milk.

Bridget had missed the video feed altogether. There had nearly been a bus crash in Montreal, skinhead vandals trying to desecrate a church in Ohio and near tragic disaster at the Indianapolis speedway when a racecar nearly ripped through the spectators, and now she was gliding at a casual fifty miles an hour over the countryside near Louisville, Kentucky. Her visions were not coming as fast as they were they were the last few days. Usually she would get a vision of one big disaster coming up or a series of smaller ones. Sometimes she had precognitive images of events that appeared in her dreams like television broadcasts of future events. If they were intense, she knew they were about to happen, but others like the school fire in California and the terrorist bombing in Manhattan were more vague. They could happen next week or next month. It just depended if the dreams kept returning to give her more details or if they faded away entirely. Judging from their intensity and the chance of tragedy, she could decide if she had to be there or if the local law and rescue forces could handle it. She didn't get very many breaks in this role she played, but she appreciated every moment she got. Outside Louisville, she did a slow ballet pirouette against the starry moonless sky and slowly descended down to the roof of the Old Waverly Hills Sanitarium. The huge tuberculosis hospital was old and derelict, and much like several of the locations she hid spare clothes, it was haunted. No one was going to enter the location looking for the clothes she had left here during the flood in North Carolina the week before. Descending closer, her feet reached down and started scuffing across the top landing where forgotten kids ages ago used to play. No one locked the door on the roof. She started retracing her steps down to the third floor.

On the second floor, Ray Stantz and Egon Spengler from New York Paranormal were filling in for Steve Gonzalez and Dave Tango in teaching amateur teenage ghost hunters. The two of them and their seven students cocked their heads up to the ceiling to the third floor as Bridget walked over their heads. Egon held up his electromagnetic detector. Its needle spiked. Ray counted their kids.

"Everyone's here." He whispered. "Who do you think that is?"

"Whatever it is, it isn't human." Egon answered. He listened to the steps continuing past them above in the dark. He whispered a few instructions to the kids, flipped down his night vision goggles and aimed his heat vision camera ahead of him up the dingy desolate stairs. On the top landing, Bridget heard the creaking stairs and turned around to see what it was. To her heightened senses, the ghosts of this place usually appeared as misty white clouds or persons composed of immaterial substance fading in and out, but whatever this presence was, it had mass. It had weight. It had a camera! Ray leapt out of view and aimed his lens on… empty air.

"Did you see that?" He checked the spot. "Did you see that?" He filmed left and right and into the old ward. "I saw a girl. She was splattered in blood all over. She was red from her ankles up."

"Let me see that…" Egon replayed his footage. There was a split instance of a figure, but she appeared more solid. He froze the single frame to show the kids. "No, that looks more like a cape. It hangs down off her shoulders."

"Where did she go?" One of the two girls asked.

"Hard to tell, she just blinks out." He resolved to split the kids up. "Okay, Jason and Zack, head down there. Brian and Amy, you two head the other way. I'll take Barry and Kris back to the second with me, and Ray, reconnoiter around here with Nick and Brad. Kids, consider this your final exam. Apply everything we've taught you in trying to capture evidence. One hour then everyone meet up at the vans. We're going live." He clapped his hands and everyone split up in their directions. Heading down the stairs of the spooky and derelict structure, Egon radioed his video and tech Victoria "Torry" Imahara in the NYPS van to activate the cameras they had set up in the place. Ten feet over their heads eavesdropping, Bridget stuck her head out from behind a large air duct in the shadows of the ceiling. She had one floor to get to her street clothes in the old operating room in the north wing. Technically, she could do without them, but she was planning on staying in a hotel tonight then appear in her Pasadena apartment in the morning to meet Leonard. She could easily evade their sensors and cameras, but she was going to do it with fun and flair.

"They want ghosts…" She whispered to herself. "I'll give them ghosts. I just want my clothes."

"Cameras live…" Torry switched on and watched the monitors in the van light up before her. They had eight cameras set up; her command in the van gave her two monitors with constant footage. She saw Ray with the two boys in a hallway, Brian and Amy in one of the old offices, Egon and two of the kids descending the stairs. On the third floor, something at the far end of the hall peeked out at the camera.

"Shadow on Camera Five."

"We're near it." Jason Howard was from Baltimore, and Zack Costello was from Philadelphia. Listening to the radio transmissions, they hurried down to the floor to catch it. Opening the door, they crashed harmlessly into a gurney in the doorway.

"Shadow on Camera Six…" Torry saw something race across the hall.

"That's behind us…" Brian Marx was from Nashville, and Amy Abbott was from near New Orleans. They heard a door slam shut behind them and when they spun around, another door slammed shut and startled them.

"Activity on Camera One…" Torry scrutinized the screen. "It looks like a moving wheelchair."

"We can't get out of the stairwell." Jason and Zack headed down the next flight of stairs. "We're heading that way."

"Simultaneous activity on Three and Five." Torry looked closer. "This thing is fast." A sudden face appeared to her and she screamed. Nick Abbott from Savannah had tripped and landed before the camera. Key West native Brad Laurel helped him back up as Ray scanned the area. He heard the location creaking a bit. He saw steps heading back down to the third floor.

"Guys, this way!"

"Dude, where's your radio?" Brad asked Nick.

"Apparition in the morgue." Bridget spoke into Nick's radio in the south wing.

"We can't get out of the stairwell." Jason and Zack hoofed out of breath back up to the third floor. "Every door is blocked."

"Wait," Torry was confused. "That last transmission wasn't me. Guys, we don't have a camera in the morgue!" She watched Camera Seven go out. Egon came down the stairs to the first floor where he had placed Camera Seven himself. With him were Barry Foxworthy and Kris Engvall, both from California, respectively San Diego and Sacramento. He looked around for the camera.

"Camera Seven is missing." Egon reported.

"Camera Seven just came back on." Torry reported. "Correction, it's in the morgue."

"What the heck is going on around here?" Ray and the two kids with him were chasing voices. He turned a corner into another empty ward expecting to find a group of people, but found empty space.

"Guys, " Torry was watching the confused running around. "I think I found Nick's missing radio. It's on camera in the morgue." With everyone else heading together for one location far away from her, Bridget casually strolled to the north operating room. She'd routed and distracted them long enough. She reached to the counter and found empty space. Where was her knapsack? It wasn't where she had left it. She turned around, looked behind the door and scanned the room. As her senses reached out, she felt the earthbound spirits of the location overlapping with the living corporeal persons converging on the dank and deserted morgue looking for answers. The ghosts were barely aware of the living; they just kept doing the same things they had did in life, but one of them knew where Bridget's extra clothes were. Ray had found them on the walk-through during setup.

"No activity." Torry rolled her seat in the van and moved the mysterious pack out of her way. Egon thought a vagrant had left them behind, but Kris recognized the expensive French boots. She did not think they belonged to a vagrant, perhaps another paranormal researcher from TAPS, Everyday Paranormal or the Collinsport Ghost Society. "Things sure settled down quickly…" She listened on her headset as Ray and Egon discussed the strange sudden sequence of distractions. Jason thought there was another person in the place, but Brad wondered why the person could elude them without being seen. As she listened, she felt the van lightly sway left to right. Had the wind picked up? It was gradually rocking. Her attractive Korean features looked around nervously. Was she now being haunted? She heard a rapping on the side of the vehicle.

"Ray," She spoke over the radios; her voice became high when she got scared. "I think it's out here with me." Torry removed her radio headset and motioned to the dashboard, her finger flipped on the headlights facing the dark front veranda of the hospital. As they lights came on, she saw Bridget standing there and screamed her head off loudly through the night. She barely noticed her outfit; she just saw her darkened visage and ran screaming toward the building.

"Sorry, sweetie…." Bridget grabbed her pack before they could find her ID in the bottom. "But these boots were expensive." She pulled her arm through the harness and levitated off her feet, ascending higher and higher until she could see the lights of Louisville in the distance.


	15. Chapter 15

15

Despite what Howard and numerous supporters of her fan base believed, there was always some thing on television that disproved that there was a girl in a comic book costume who could fly and flip over cars. The Mythbusters had shown on their program that in one segment of footage from the year before a device was shown that helped in flipping a car. They also used their red-haired co-hostess to help prove how lines could be used to fake flight, but Howard got on-line that night and wrote a 5,000 word essay chastising their results and proving that they had only proved that those two cases had been frauds perpetuated by imposters. The following month, Howard was on the Internet praising the cast of "Fact Or Faked" for their episode devoted to testing superhuman strength, resistance to bullets and the debate between flight and levitation. If there was a real Supergirl, they argued, her flying abilities were more rooted in levitation, but they couldn't agree on a likely propulsion source. If anything, the two paranormal documentaries ended that any true Supergirl's greatest power was that like ghosts, Bigfoot or the Bermuda Triangle that so few people believed she existed and she could stay hidden in society almost forever. Kerry had watched and recorded both programs for fresh new insight on her sister's whereabouts. She kept most of her research to herself – not even sharing it with her mother.

Following a business lunch with a client of Elaine Flockhart, her mentor, Kerry passed a collectibles store three blocks from her law firm with Supergirl paraphernalia in the window. She stopped and looked at it all out of passing interest. Elaine even stopped and perused it too. There were Supergirl dolls, Supergirl action figures, reprints of old newspaper articles about the sightings and even a collector's cape with the Kryptonian emblem on it. The most common object was the Supergirl book collection. They had titles like "Supergirl and Other Alleged Superhuman Sightings," "A Kryptonian Guide To Supergirl" and "Why The World Needs Supergirl: The Best Evidence." It was a phenomenon that had gone out of control. Everyone was making money off it, particularly DC Comics enjoying the attention of the mystery person who seemingly had the power to impersonate their fictional character.

"That's a lot of crap for someone that no one believes in." Elaine commented.

"It's gotten a little out of hand." Kerry added. None of the dolls, plush toys or merchandise really looked like Bridget, and that was possibly a good thing. It probably made it harder for anyone to recognize in the street out of costume. "Do you think anyone will ever uncover the truth?"

"I doubt it." Elaine took a short breath. "It's probably going to keep going until she runs out of steam." She looked through the window. "Scotland has its Lock Ness memorabilia, Canada has its Bigfoot memorabilia, and we've got out our Supergirl artifacts…" She sighed and looked closer in side. "I wonder whose face they use in all the likenesses."

"Probably Reese Witherspoon…" Kerry answered.

"What makes you say that?"

"No particular reason." Kerry echoed back.

"You know…" Elaine continued on her way. "What really scares me is the number of girls who are getting to get hurt because of her." She looked to Kerry catching up with her. "I mean… no one knows who she really is, so what's to stop some lunatic from just opening fire on a girl in that costume."

"I never thought about that…" Kerry subconsciously debated on it. "But don't you think most girls are smarter than trying to do something that can get them killed."

"If people had any smarts, Kerry…" Elaine looked upon her protégé. "We'd be out of a job." She paused. "So, any new progress on finding your sister?"

"Kind of," Kerry looked up and pulled a lock of her wind-tossed red locks from her face. "I think I have a lead in California, but it's one of those things I really need to be there in person to check out and confirm."

"Well, Kerry," Elaine looked toward her. "I can help you get to the West Coast." They stopped to wait for the crosswalk signal at the corner crossing. "I take occasional cases in Los Angeles, and I can take you with me on my next trip. You would have plenty of time to do whatever you need to do to find her."

"You think so?" Kerry sounded interested, but as the crossing light came up and she started across, she looked up and thought she saw Bridget coming toward her. She was the right height, the same hairstyle, but up close, she looked different. This girl was wearing a Supergirl t-shirt, but her skin tone was lighter, more like alabaster and her eyes were a bit narrower. Her eyes were blue azure rather than the bright blue she remembered her sister had. Kerry's eyes locked on the twenty-year old college girl talking on her cell phone and continued on across the street as the girl passed her.

"Kerry?" Elaine looked back at her.

"When are you going to Los Angeles?" She asked. She was getting obsessed with this fixation to find her sister. If she had to look and study the faces of every twenty-something blonde who wore the t-shirts or track down every photo of a faked sighting, she was going to do it. The problem was there were hundreds of them. Girls purchased the costumes to entice their boyfriends, struggling actresses wore them in low-budget commercials and college sororities had parties with girls of every type in the same costume. Most of them were girls looking for a bit of confidence. In Malibu, California, high school student Miley Stewart knew the type of confidence that came from having an alter ego. Strolling into the cottage home on the property of her new ranch home, she looked round for her best friend.

"Miley, is that you?" Lily called from their clothes closet.

"Yeah," Miley had just recently outed herself as pop star Hannah Montana to the world. Gone was her privacy, gone was her secret identity and gone was her crazy lifestyle as she decided to take a few years off to attend college. She thumbed through her mail on the table as Lily moved about out of sight.

"You still wanna go to Jesse's beach party with me?" She called.

"I don't know…" Lily came strolling out. "Think I should wear this?" She was wearing the Supergirl costume she had ordered on-line. It was just a cheap blue leotard and red skirt and cape with red boots. Her chest was emblazoned with a thin veneer covering of the red Kryptonian "S" on a yellow background. At the adult level, she looked ridiculous, but as a teenager, she felt cool and almost felt that if she jumped off the roof, she just might fly.

"Yikes!" Miley's eyes rounded in stunned surprise. "Where the heck did you get that?"

"I ordered it." Lily posed like the comic book character and turned round modeling her new favorite outfit. "What do you think?"

"Well…" Miley looked her over once and again. "It looks a bit… tight." She noticed something else. "That can't all be you…" She pointed her Lily's chest.

"I padded it a bit to stick out a little." Lily pushed down and molded her cleavage. "I mean – I don't want to look like a boy in this; I want to look hot… Hey…" She grinned with a thought. "Wouldn't it be funny if we could convince Jackson that I was Supergirl…"

"Lily…" Miley rolled her eyes away and placed a supportive and cynical hand to her best friend's shoulder. "Look, my brother is a lot of things, but even he is not that…"

"Miley," Jackson entered her cottage. "Dad says you've got…" He looked across to his sister and then Lily in that costume. That red cape, that form fitting blue costume with the huge red "S" on yellow across her bosom, the red pleated skirt with the yellow belt, it couldn't be! It just couldn't be! His eyes flared a bit, his eyes glazed over a bit and his voice began stammering as he started backing away in denial.

"No, it couldn't be…" He mumbled. "It just couldn't be… You couldn't possibly…"

"Oh no, Miley…" Lily unconvincingly improvised a scene. Her voice was slow and static; her act stiff and unconvincing. "Jackson busted my secret identity. My secret is out." She unconvincingly pretended to be surprised.

"No!" Jackson refused to accept it. "No! It can't be you! It just can't…" He turned running back to the main house.

"Well, what do you know?" Miley looked back the way he had departed. "He really is that…."

"Wait a minute!" Jackson had got as far as the inside of the kitchen when he realized he was mistaken and returned. "You were on the plane that Supergirl saved! You can't be her!"

"Was I really, Jackson?" Lily strolled over to him grinning mischievously. "Was I really?" She came up to him with her cape swaying side to side off her shoulders. "Just think… this whole time you've been wondering about and worshipping me, I've been right under your nose…" She tapped his nose to spite him.

"No!" Jackson once more refused to accept it. "No! It can't be you! It just can't… Please tell me it isn't you!" He turned and ran back to the main house.

"I stand corrected…" Miley looked as if she was about to start laughing. "He really is that simple."

At that moment, the real blonde in the red cape was softly cruising the skies over Detroit just under the radar of the nearby airport. She had secretly eavesdropped on her parents being romantic just before CJ entered the house and then she cruised the perimeter of the city once more before starting to drift further out of town. Her left hand dipped as her body turned counterclockwise in the wind current blowing her along the magnetic ley line on the planet. Her long blonde tresses poured past her head in the breeze as her aerobic ballet carried her just a bit lower. Nothing was happening that her senses could pick up. Maybe she really had cleaned up her hometown. Her nearly clairvoyant senses reached out further and further, sifting through conversations and dialogues and discussions at a subconscious level. It was like listening to a muffled audience of over five thousand people with numerous voices moving in and out as her proximity to them moved.

"You need to get away from that computer."

"We had spaghetti last night."

"How much did that dress cost?"

"Why are you wearing my sister's dress?"

"The dog is pregnant!"

"Your mother-in-law has got to go!"

"I can't believe I'd like salads so much!" Local contractor Jim Belushi beamed to his wife over dinner.

"And haven't you been feeling so much better?" His beautiful wife, Cheryl, beamed to him. She was his life, his love, his reason for being, and yet, he did nothing but take her for granted. Jim's basic belief was that lying was only lying when he got caught, and he got caught often. This had been a nice romantic night for them. Their two daughters were off at the movies with her sister Dana, either watching a nice family movie or a god awful pretentious animated featured based on a bad idea.

"You know…" Jim pretended to agree with her. "I really do think I am." He grinned to her. "You know… I got you a gift too!"

"Jim," Cheryl lit up as a contented wife. "You didn't have to do that!"

"I know…" He crossed their living room and reached behind the chair by the front door. He took out a large flat box wrapped in a ribbon without a bow. "I just wanted to show that… I love you." He kissed her as he gave it to her.

"I can't wait to see what it is!" Cheryl pulled the ribbon off and sat on the sofa to pull the box apart. She found a swatch of red fabric then pulled out a blue leotard with a big red and yellow "S" on the chest. Her expression was of surprise then turned to confusion. She looked to her husband with the big grin on his face. He had ordered it from the official novelty store as the majority of the phenomenon's merchandise.

"Jim, are you…"

"I thought you could wear it while we fooled around."

"What?"

"Well, " Jim detected reluctance on her part. "Didn't you say you wanted to role-play a bit to spice up our sex lives?"

"Well, yeah…"

"Great!" Jim acted like a big kid. "Tonight, I'll be the bad guy robbing the bank, and you'll be Super-Babe coming to stop me. You can change in the downstairs bathroom!" He giddily chuckled to himself and raced upstairs pulling his sweatshirt off to jump in bed and wait for her. Left behind on the sofa, Cheryl didn't know what to think. Her idea was for her and Jim to pretend to be single again, maybe act like strangers, not commit to clandestine costumes. As she stood up again to hesitantly consider it, someone knocked at the door.

"Cheryl, whoever that is, get rid of them!" Jim yelled from upstairs. "I'm waiting for my Kryptonian cutie!"

"Yeah, yeah, yeah…" Cheryl draped the costume over the end of the sofa, strided to the door and opened it, standing face to face with a blonde girl in the Supergirl costume. At first, she thought this was some demented perverse fantasy, but her presence, her bearing, the offended glare on her face… She just had to be the real thing! Cheryl's jaw dropped in shock, her eyes widened with surprise. She thought she was some sort of prank, but her look, her posture, her hair, the way her arms were folded with that annoyed sort of look in her face. It had to be her.

"You've got to be kidding me!" Bridget exclaimed with disgust.

"Oh, my god…" Cheryl reacted with awe. "Oh, my god!" She could barely breath. "It's you! It's really you!"

"Yeah…." Bridget pulled a strand of her hair back. "Look, I think you should know your husband went off his diet about two weeks ago, and he and your brother have since been stuffing themselves since then at lunch on barbecued ribs and French fries at some place called Fat Tony's." She paused a bit. "Now, I can do a lot of things, but I can't stop a heart attack. Believe me, I have tried."

"What?" Cheryl got over her star struck behavior to get annoyed. "You mean he's been lying to me?"

"Cheryl…" Jim called happily from upstairs. "Get rid of whosever at the door. I'm waiting for my own Kryptonian fantasy to come true…"

"Like a cheap rug…." Bridget answered.

"That rat bastard!" Cheryl was getting so tired of her husband lying to her. She looked at the costume over the end of the sofa and back to Bridget. "Do you want this?"

"Let's see…" Bridget stepped inside, picked it up and checked the fabric. "No, it's cheap fabric. I need better stuff to hold when I fly. If I wore this, it's rip right off me at 150 miles an hour." She laid it back down. "Give it to your sister."

"Thank you so much!" Cheryl grinned again. "And it was so nice to meet you!"

"Yeah, me too! Take care…" Bridget shined, stepped out the front door and off the front porch into the air. Closing the door behind her, Cheryl felt something else for her lying and conniving husband. It was more like frustration, anger and hostility. If it was in her power, she be a much different comic book character for him… someone bigger, stronger and greener.

"Oh, Jim…." She pretended to be sweet before she broke another vase over his head.

Several neighborhoods over in another part of Detroit, Kerry had returned home with the newspaper to find her parents out for dinner. Bridget had been reported a few blocks away tossing gang members in the freezer of the local Long John Silvers. One minute, they robbing the place and then a red and blue flash later, they were stripped to their underwear and locked in the restaurant freezer. If that didn't teach them not to break the law, they knew she'd be back, either stringing them up by their underwear from a cell phone tower or trapping them in a trash dumpster with a car on top. Expecting a new photo, Kerry sighed to find the story buried on the next to last page of the first section. She clipped it out in the kitchen to tape into her scrapbook.

"Ooooo…." CJ caught a glimpse of the newspaper account about his grandfather and the two hold-up guys at the drugstore. Al and Trudy Borland were mentioned in it as well. "Another story about Super-Babe in the newspaper? I wouldn't try using kryptonite on her in bed."

"CJ!" Both Kerry and her grandfather reacted. CJ might not have known it was Bridget, but they didn't need him talking about her in that manner. It was decent and immoral, and the mere thought of it disgusted them.

"My God, CJ!" Jim Eagan looked repulsed at what CJ had implied. "That girl does a lot for a lot of people. She's not some sort of hootchy-cootchy girl!"

"I'm sorry!" CJ apologized. "I didn't think you cared that much about her."

"Well," Jim looked at Kerry and back again. "I do, and I respect her too. I think she's a great American."

"Sorry, Grampy…" CJ stood by the old codger. "I didn't know."

"Well, now you do."

"I do." CJ paused. "By the way, what's the family secret?"

"You were born with a tail." Jim announced and Kerry started laughing out loud. She got a lot of laughs from watching her cousin and grandfather go at it. Absorbing the misinformation, CJ just stood there taking in the teasing, and waiting for them to trust him. He could keep a secret. Why couldn't they see it? Forcing a little smile to deflect some of the embarrassment, he motioned toward the staircase to go get ready for his date.

"So, the cover-up continues…" He mumbled and tramped up the stairs for Rory's old room trying to contain his humility.

"I love you, grandpa." Kerry hugged and kissed her grandfather. "You're so funny." She carried her scrapbook under her arm.

"Yeah, I'm a regular Henny Youngman." He read the paper.

"Who?" Kerry didn't know that 1950s comedian. Jim suddenly started feeling old. Feeling better, Kerry turned toward the family computer and logged in as she slid into the chair. She checked for her regular websites and pulled up Howard Wolowitz's _Incredible Supergirl Sightings Database_. It looked like the chat room was already going without her. She signed in with her G-Mail account, and her KHennessey86 screen-name immediately popped up on top. Howard and Justin were debating again as Sir Howard and Web-Wizard. Jackson Stewart got a few lines in the debate under the name Dark-Knight along with Phil using the name Phil-Of-The-Future. Lizzie McGuire's little brother, Matt McGuire, just tried getting another discussion started by reposting the same line over and over: "Does anyone have new images?"

"I got one." Kerry answered him.

"Is it good?" Matt answered.

"No, it's blurry." Kerry answered. It was from the news footage by Randy Taylor.

"I've got one." Bud Bundy entered as Grandmaster-B.

"Your sister as the Verminator again?" Chad Dylan Cooper finally got on after just reading the posts.

"Forget it." Bud responded.

"My sister looks more like Supergirl than yours." Matt McGuire posted.

"I had a dream the real Supergirl logs in and reads our posts." Chad announced.

"You posted that last week."

"Well, I had the same dream again."

"Kerry, any relationship to the Hennessey in the Detroit story?" Howard tried contacting Kerry.

"My mother and grandfather." Kerry answered. By time she hit "Send," several messages started going up one atop each other. Howard and Justin and Jackson and Phil and Rory and Matt and Zack and Derek….

Kerry gave them all the same response.

"I wasn't there."

"Anyone get the book, "Supergirl: The Best Evidence." Justin asked.

"Mine's on back-order." Bud typed in.

"It's not that good." Phil entered. "Mostly stuff and photos covered in the last seventeen books."

"Do you guys really care that much about that stuff?" Kerry asked.

Nearly everyone answered, "Yes."

"My best friend Leonard got a great Supergirl prop." Howard typed in his message and posted it before adding the second part. "He got a cape Helen Slater wore in the 1984 movie!"

"Wow…" Justin chimed in his message. "That must have cost a fortune."

"Actually, it's just a reproduction." Howard added. "He got it from a girl in his building."

"Where did she get it?" Phil asked.

"E-Bay." Howard posted then added. "Ironically, I thought she was Supergirl once."

Kerry saw his message come up and was about to log off. She typed back in.

"What changed your mind?"

"She's too busy to be Supergirl." Howard posted. Kerry looked at his post. She had a feeling about it. Something deep down was nagging at her. Could this be Bridget in California?

"Wouldn't it be cool if she was?" Jackson posted.

"Maybe she is!" Chad added.

"What does she look like?" Kerry finally asked.

"Tall, blonde, beautiful and scented like a cheesecake goddess." Howard grinned a bit as he typed his reply. He noticed the time on his screen. He was due to meet Raj in a few minutes to head over to Leonard and Sheldon.

"It's a shame it wasn't her." Bud posted.

"Think we'll ever know who she really is?" Justin typed in.

"I don't know." Matt typed in.

"I've got to go, guys." Howard was getting ready to sign out. "Keep up the chat." He quickly wrapped. "I'll read the messages tomorrow."

"Howard…" Kerry was quickly trying to type in. "What do you know…" Howard's icon indicated he had logged out. "No!" She had just missed him. She closed her message, clicked on his icon and pulled up his profile. Immediately she saw his real face with the thick Beatles-era haircut and his big goofy grin, the same one he tried obviously to charm girls. His homepage link took her to a page for the Engineering Department at the California Institute of Technology. It had a phone number on it. Kerry reached for her cell phone. In Pasadena, Howard was tramping down the stairs of his mother's house. He took his jacket off its peg at the bottom of the stairs. His route took him to the front door.

"Ma, I'm going to go see Raj and the guys!" He called to his mother in the kitchen as the phone started ringing. "The phone is ringing!"

"How late are you going to be?" His mother yelled back as the phone stopped ringing.

"I don't know!" Howard started out the door. "Between eleven and twelve." He closed the door behind him.

"Howard, there's a girl on the phone for you!"

"Did you say a girl?" Howard re-entered the house. "A real one?"

"She asked for you!"

Howard tossed himself backward on to his mother's plastic-covered sofa, changed his voice to suave and debonair and tried to sound like James Bond. He picked up the cordless phone in the living room.

"Hello…" He tried to sound suave.

"Howard…" Kerry recaught her breath in Detroit and talked on her cell phone. "Hi, this is Kerry in Detroit from the Supergirl Chat."

"Kerry, hey…." Howard relaxed. "Could you hold a minute?" He placed her on hold then jumped up and raced back to his upstairs bedroom over the living room, jumped into his seat at his computer and pulled up his website again, scanned for her name in his chat list and hit her icon. She didn't have a picture on her chat profile, but her homepage link went to her Facebook page where he saw a beautiful redhead with long curly hair staring back at him. "Whoa! Hot mama!" Howard became suave and sophisticated as he released her from hold. "Kerry…." He tried to sound friendly. "Fancy hearing from you."

"Yeah…" Kerry unconsciously sounded alluring to him. "Look, you logged out of the chat a bit quick…" She logged herself out of it as the chat started questioning what actress other than Reese Witherspoon they thought Supergirl looked like. "The blonde girl in your friend's building… um…" She took a deep breath. "What initially made you think that she was Supergirl?"

"What?" Howard was a bit put off by that question; he had hoped she was calling for him. "Well, I guess it started first with a photo my buddy, Raj, got from India of his sister. There was a girl that looked just like Penny in it and we started wondering how that happened. I mean… Penny is not exactly a world traveler."

"Really…" Kerry wanted a last name for this Penny. "And what happened with that?"

"We lost the picture." Howard revealed. "My buddy's laptop somehow erased it." He paused. "So, Kerry, do you have a boyfriend?"

"Interesting…" Kerry ignored the boyfriend remark. She recalled when her camera inexplicably rejected Kyle's testimony he had seen Bridget in her costume. "But did something else change your mind?"

"Yeah…" Howard continued. "I digitally-enhanced some existing film footage and it started looking like Penny again, but as Leonard pointed out, Penny works constantly. She couldn't possibly have a dual identity."

"Yeah, sounds logical…" Kerry started turning devious herself. "So, this Penny… What's her last name? Do you have any images of her?"

"Yeah, on my Facebook page…" Howard had just friended Kerry on the social website. Kerry ran a Google search for Penny Parker and got sites and images for a brunette 90s actress with the same name. "So, Kerry, you know, if you're ever in Pasadena, you know, I could show you around town."

"Pasadena…" Kerry thought about it. "Yeah, I could come to Pasadena. In fact, I'm pretty sure I'll be coming to Pasadena very soon." She noticed an e-mail notification about Howard friending her on Facebook. His Facebook picture was the same as on his Cal-Tech profile. She confirmed their friendship then went straight to his photos. There were a lot of them. Science Fiction fairs, Howard in fantasy costumes, Howard in super hero costumes, Howard with Rajesh Koothrapalli, Howard and Leonard, Howard with his mother. She clicked to more pictures.

"Great!" Howard grinned. "Just let me know when you're coming."

"Yeah, I'll see you there." Kerry listened as Howard hung up his phone in Pasadena to catch up with Raj and Leonard. In Detroit, Kerry continued searching through Howard's Facebook photos and clicked on another on-line album. She noticed another image with Howard with a blonde. It looked as if it was taken at arm's length, surprising the unprepared beauty, but when Kerry looked at it, she recognized Penny Parker as someone else. It was definitely Bridget. There was no doubt about it. She was taller now, even more beautiful, even more blonde, but it was her. Kerry wanted to jump up screaming and shouting, but she didn't. She was too numb. She had found her sister. She could go see her if she wanted. She had found her. She sat looking at her sister's face.

"Oh my god…" She felt she was about to break down crying from the emotion she was feeling.

A pop-up came up on the computer to let her know she had received another e-mail. Starring at the photo of the girl believed to be Penny Parker, Kerry tried to ignore it, but her hand unconsciously reached up and tapped on the pop-up. In her e-mail account, she had received a message from someone she didn't know. Kerry's eyes forced herself to read it.

"Miss Hennessey, I believe I might have info pertaining to the whereabouts of your sister. Please meet me at the northeast entrance of the park near your law firm on your lunch break between Twelve and One PM."

It was signed, "Fox Mulder."


	16. Chapter 16

16

Kerry didn't know anyone named Fox Mulder. She wasn't even sure it was a real name, but she was intrigued by his message. During her lunch break, she broke from routine and took her lunch from the bistro on the first floor to go. Instead of sitting and eating on the outside patio, she walked across the street and entered Highland Park through its northeast entrance. Sitting and eating her sandwich with her newest Temperance Brennan crime novel, she watched the kids on the playground and periodically looked searching for her contact. She wasn't sure what he looked like. He could have been the bald guy with the paunch belly that jogged through and nearly crashed into the baby stroller while ogling the busty blonde, or he could have been the guy in the suit dating the girl seven years his junior. Getting through her sandwich, Kerry checked her watch and looked around again.

"Miss Hennessey?"

Kerry spun around to the figure that had come up behind her. Dressed in blue jeans with an unbuttoned white dress shirt and light jacket, he looked to be in his forties with piercing blue eyes and an unruly shock of uncombed brown hair tinged with gray hairs. She placed him somewhere in his early forties. Mulder reached to shake her hand.

"Sorry to come a bit late, but I wanted to let you finish your lunch first." He sat down by her on the same bench that Kerry had risen from. "I'm Fox Mulder…"

"I don't understand why you wanted to talk to me." Kerry placed her book in her purse and crumpled up her trash to toss in the receptacle by her. "Do I know you? Do you know Bridget?"

"No, I never had the honor to meet her." Mulder looked around a bit and sat with his fingers interlinked and hanging down off his knees. "But we do know someone in common. William Collins?"

"Oh, yeah…" Kerry knew the novelist. "His mother was a nanny or something for my mom when she was young." She tried to recall the family link with the Collins family of Maine.

"William's an old friend, we attended camp together as kids…" Mulder added. "Anyway, I understand you've been trying to track down Bridget."

"Yeah…"

"Kerry," Mulder started with a deep breath. "I'm ex-FBI." He noticed her reaction. "I retired a few years ago, but my wife is still an agent. While I was part of the organization, I was part of the X-Files division. It was my job to investigation public occurrences that fell outside the perimeters of regular law agencies, like UFO sightings and suspected occult murders."

"Okay…" Kerry reacted hesitantly.

"Today, I've stayed in the subject as a writer. I've published a few books about the government's covert knowledge of alien contact, and that's where I became fascinated by your sister." He continued. "Your sister, Bridget, by all accounts was a very normal high school girl, but I believe she became involved with a supernatural event sometime in November 2005 that gave her abilities that she felt driven or compelled her to…" He paused trying to select the right words. "…Save the world from itself."

"Why do you think this girl is my sister?" Kerry pulled her hair blown into her face by a breeze.

"Because it would be impossible for a girl to be gone for days and even weeks without her family and friends getting suspicious." Mulder used simple deductive reasoning. "Your sister vanished March 18, 2006, and was never seen or heard of again. The body the police identified as her has since been identified as remains from a flooded cemetery the year before. Meanwhile, a girl resembling Bridget has been seen living in New York City, Chicago, Boston, London, Toronto and San Francisco where her trail ends. However, if you believe our friend, Howard Wolowitz, she lives somewhere around Los Angeles."

"You think I should look in Los Angeles for her, don't you?" Kerry asked him.

"Your mentor, Miss Flockhart, is heading to Santa Monica next month to sign off on an inheritance claim." Mulder looked to Kerry as if he was her big brother. "I think you should go along on that trip."

It was Monday night. Following Sheldon begrudgingly in his egocentric schedule, the guys hesitantly indulged him and prepared for a night of Thai Food followed by a night of the movies, but the evening did not go off with a good start. The Thai Palace they regularly frequented was booked for a private party and they were forced to drag Sheldon griping, harping and complaining over the alteration to his schedule to another location. After some cajoling, they finally forced him to flip Thai Food Monday and Hamburger Tuesday for that week which meant heading to the Cheesecake Factory for his bacon cheeseburger. On their arrival, the found the place sparsely busy and their regular table open.

"You'd think…" Sheldon took his seat. "That after eating there every Monday after several years that they could have called to allow me to approve before allowing a strange party to occupy my regular table."

"Sheldon," Leonard looked exasperatingly toward Howard and Raj then back to Sheldon. "The world does not revolve around your schedule. Every so often you need to learn to adapt."

"Leonard." Sheldon sighed at this change in his routine. "I have had an on-going dietary regime for several years which has continued unabated since I was twelve. Seafood Sundays, Thai Food Mondays, Hamburger Tuesdays…"

"I know! I know!" Leonard interrupted him. "I've got your schedule!" He lifted his menu to decide what he wanted. His aggravation slowly simmering, he wished he had accepted that offer of room and board in Jimmy's house back before he got married. As he debated getting something new, he noticed Bernadette come up alongside the table. She was one of the girls who worked with Penny.

"Hi, guys…" Bernadette spoke in her light kewpie-doll voice. "I didn't know it was Tuesday."

"It's not." Sheldon responded knowing he was getting his bacon cheeseburger. The preceding conversation was just a mandatory social triviality he had to endure with the guys.

"Let's not go there, okay…." Howard spoke up and looked around. "Uh, where's Penny? I thought she was working here tonight."

"I haven't seen her."

"That's weird…" Leonard scowled. "I recall seeing her leave for work at noon in her uniform." He thought back and recalled seeing her with that large purse she always had.

"Well, she doesn't always wait tables with us when she's here." Bernadette knew the guys well enough to talk casually. "She manages the books with the manager, approves the menus, runs receipts to the bank, closes up…"

"That sounds like stuff the owner should be doing." Sheldon commented.

"I've never met the owner…" Bernadette confessed. "But Penny knows her daughter, Billie. I think they're friends or something."

Raj suddenly whispered something in Howard's ear.

"Penny is friends with the daughter of Linda Kent?" Howard scoffed and reacted amazed. "Oh my God… I wonder why she's never mentioned it to us."

"I don't know, but if you want the truth…" Bernadette spoke up. "I think Penny's their spy here. Everyone tries to stay on their toes when she shows up."

"But Penny's works here six days a week right?" Howard asked.

"She's here every Monday to wait tables while you guys are here, and then, she leaves." The cute busty grad student revealed. "Other than that, she periodically shows up to take care of things."

"What's she doing the rest of the time?" Leonard asked intrigued.

"Probably running things for Miss Kent…" Bernadette answered as she lifted her waitress pad. "You guys do know Miss Kent also owns your apartment building."

"She does?" Sheldon reacted. "I wonder if we can get to get the elevator fixed."

"Why is Penny keeping this all a secret?" Howard looked at Raj then Leonard uncontrollably. He was both invigorated by these facts and bursting with compelling anxiety to share them with his mother. "If I was friends with the daughter of a lady millionaire, I'd be screaming it from a microphone at Comic Con."

"Maybe that's why she doesn't talk about it." Leonard spoke up. "Bernadette, could I get the Club Sandwich with side salad? No cheese."

Raj whispered in Howard's ear again.

"Raj would like the Meat Lover's Sandwich with French Fries, and I'd like the Seafood Grande with Onion Rings." Howard announced.

"And Sheldon, you're getting the Double Bacon Cheeseburger with Fries, right?" Bernadette knew his routine as well.

"Of course…" He responded.

"Sodas all around?" All the guys agreed on the choice of drinks, and Bernadette spun round to deliver their orders to the kitchen and take the order to Table Five. When she entered the employee corridor off the dining room, she looked up through her glasses and saw Bridget at the end of the hall outside the manager's office. She looked deep in thought, her arms crossed before her chest, but her eyes were focused on Bernadette. Dressed in blue jeans and a dark long-sleeved sweater, she had just been casually floating over when she overheard Bernadette with her heightened senses. Grabbing the clothes she kept concealed on the roof, she quickly dashed in before continuing her rounds down the coast.

"Jenny…" Bridget lightly prodded one of the other girls. "Take Bernadette's order for her a second." She looked over to the short busty grad student. "Bernadette?" She opened the office and gestured her into it. Blinking a moment under her glasses, Bernadette feared the worse and followed behind her. It was so awkward to be treated by her from a managerial position. Closing the door, Bridget turned and leaned back on the edge of the desk. Molly, one of the two brunette waitresses, paused to overhear outside if Bernadette was getting fired.

"Did you hear me talking to the guys about you?" Bernadette's squeaky little voice asked. "I didn't even know you were here. Please don't fire me; I owe a fortune in student loans."

"Sweetie… honey, " Bridget pulled her long blonde tresses back behind her ears. "Don't talk about my life in front of the guys, okay? I mean… there's a reason I don't talk about…" She paused as her mind accelerated through several stories and excuses and took the best one. "My friendship with Billie and her mother…" She was following a cue from the speculation in the restaurant about her. "You see, if I talked about it, I wouldn't know if anyone liked me for me or because I knew someone wealthy."

"Is that why you pretend to be a waitress for the guys?" Bernadette asked in the dimly lit office.

"Pretty much…" Bridget went along with that.

"I'm sorry; I won't do it again."

"If anyone ever asks again…" Bridget looked up to her again. "Just say it's my day off or I left early…. Okay?"

"Okay."

"Great!" Bridget hugged her now that they had an understanding. "And I'm sure if I asked nicely, maybe Billie could ask her mother to help pay off your loans…"

"That would be so sweet!" Bernadette lit up. "And maybe I could get a raise?"

"Don't go shaking the money tree here, sweetie…" Bridget opened the door and Molly, Ted the dishwasher and Barney and Gus the bus boys scattered from eavesdropping at the door. A look around to make sure they returned to work, Bridget watched as Bernadette returned to waiting on tables and then looked out from afar out the employee entrance. Through her senses, she overheard them debating the use of "Star Trek" transporter technology within the "Star Wars" universe. Bernadette brought them their sodas a moment later and then a silent ultra-sonic alarm went off nearby to override their voices in her head. Turning on her heel, Bridget passed through the kitchen and the utility room on her way out the door. Her sweater pulled off over her head and her blue jeans and boots popping off to land on the roof near her bag, she extended her right arm forward and followed the sound of the alarm toward the spire of the local Pasadena Methodist Church where Eric and Steven Prince trashed the pastor's office. They had recently been relocated to town against their will after their mother had died of cancer. Pastor Fredrick Burkhart was their next living relative, and the two bored felons retaliated against his rigid household by breaking into his office, trashing it then pouring gasoline down the hall. They were pouring it down the middle of the church when the red and blue blur crashed through the doors and Bridget suddenly appeared in her Kryptonian costume.

"Holy crap…" Steven looked to his brother in the barely lit church. "She's real!"

"I hope you boys are wearing clean underwear tonight…" Bridget grinned with a slight giggle. Eric was first to try and run, but a dizzying flash of images later, he was hanging by his underwear band forty feet into the air off the steeple and his brother was right next to him. It was all the start of a very regular and atypical week for the mysterious blonde heroine: assorted drivers trying to evade police in eighteen states, two Canadian provinces and the countryside near London, England, twelve more vandals in Tennessee, Arkansas and Colorado, five street gangs in Tokyo, Chicago and Brooklyn, three drug boats off the Florida coast, covert marijuana fields in Kentucky, a car theft ring in Johannesburg, South Africa, a prostitution ring near Tijuana, Mexico and a very inebriated actress on the Los Angeles Freeway. On Friday, she was back home in Detroit when "America's Most Wanted" was on the pursuit for Beatrice Esmerelda Gonzalez, the "Black Widow Killer," for the murders of her seven ex-husbands in Florida, Georgia and North Carolina. Before the show was even over, a phone call over the air announced that Beatrice could be found hanging around the Waffle House Restaurant off Highway 75, and she was… She was found twenty feet over it with a steel rod bent around her body with her brother and accomplice, DeJesus Desiderio Gonzalez, right next to her hanging by his underwear pulled up over his head.

"What's with the police?" Dr. Elizabeth Masterson was there when the brother was wheeled in to Detroit's St. Thomas Hospital with injuries and pneumonia from the cold. His sister also had symptoms of pneumonia from being held off the cell phone tower for a few hours. There were eleven police officers and three news teams covering the capture of the Black Widow after being on the run over twenty states for seven years. The examination room was packed with activity, cameras going off and questions from every direction.

"She's back!" Marcy cheered the return of the blonde one to Detroit and walked away laughing her head off with a patient file. She had been a big supporter of their mysterious blonde heroine for ten years now and was even on the e-mail list for monthly newsletters from Howard's _Incredible Supergirl Sightings Database_. Cate was administering penicillin to the Black Widow while looking up with a secret glance to Liz, and Dr. Dorian was wrapping the brother's broken arm in gauze. What had started out with trying to shoot the mystery blonde in the head had ended with his superhuman female attacker flipping him over by his arm and then tossed out a window ten feet to the ground on his back. His sister almost got away, but her Mercedes was now expensive litter and detritus up and down Highway 75. The look between Liz and Cate was their mutual acknowledgment of Bridget's secret life far from home. Cate missed Bridget very much, and Liz was her next possible confidant after Paul. Checking on her tonsillitis patient recovering from surgery, she looked up to Cate doing her duties and turned away in her light blue scrubs down the hall. The majority of the patient rooms had windows while the inner rooms were used for storage and offices. She had Dr. Hackett's old office, but just before she entered to catch up on her paperwork, she noticed a post-it stuck to her door. Someone had left her a message.

"Meet me on the roof - 9:30"

Her watch read 9:34. Looking around and wondering what this was about, the cute petite lady physician took a moment to toss her clipboard on her desk and marched back out to the hall. Maybe her boyfriend, William, was back in town, or maybe her crazy sister was threatening to jump off the roof again, but that sounded ridiculous. Kate's therapist said that she had confessed to be hesitant about suicide, and she was much more happier with Russell in her life. Palming the note in her left hand, Liz entered the stairwell and lightly jogged up to the roof. It was mostly where the hospital's smokers like Marcy and Oliver snuck their disgusting nicotine habits. A blast of cold night air hit Liz in the face as she pulled the top door open and stepped out in her hospital sneakers. It was a cold night, and on the roof, Liz might as well have stood naked on it because her hospital scrubs did not keep her warm.

"Hello?" She scowled and undid her hair in the bun. "I'm only a little late…" All she saw was the dark outlines of structures and trees around the perimeter of the hospital against the dark violet sky with random lights dotting the area. A distant truck went up the highway, and brakes squealed in the distance. Her feet made crunching sounds to the roof as if she was walking on potato chips. AC boxes, vents and assorted images rested in the roof. Liz's childlike face scowled as she turned looking around. She wasn't that late. Her hands under her arms for the cold, she shivered once and heard more crunching from the roof as she spun around to the door.

"Doctor Masterson…." Bridget stood in her costume. "It's me…" Her costume looked like a combination of latex and silk. It was a rich dark blue color with a neon bright red and yellow Kryptonian "S" emblem emblazoned across her chest. Her belt was nothing more for show, a thick yellow band with a fake buckle holding the top of her short red skirt from her waist. Hanging from her shoulders and tucked into a c-pattern from the top of her flat collar, her cape hung down to the backs of her knees like huge red wings from her back. Her skin was flawless; her eyes bluer than she recalled. Her bone structure was perfect. Her round eyes were innocent like a child, and her chin came to a sculpted point much like her own. It was no wonder they were both compared to actress Reese Witherspoon. Bridget's hair was incredible – it was long and extraordinary with an immortal extravagance to it. She looked like a goddess down off Mount Olympus. Liz was awestruck to be reunited with her. She tried to talk, but her voice was struck mute by this girl she once thought she knew. Unlike Liz, she was not shivering in the cold.

"Oh my god… oh my god…"

"Yeah, that's right…." Bridget spoke with a honeyed slow voice. "It's me." She lit up with that plaintiff grin.

"Bridget, oh my god…" Liz tried to catch her breath. "You… you… Bridget…"

"How's my mom?"

"Great!" Liz covered her face with her hands briefly trying to contain her glee and surprise. "Great! She misses her so much, but…" Liz chuckled awkwardly surprised again. "But, honey…. Why me? Why are you appearing to me instead of your mother?"

"I kind of figured out after our little tête-à-tête in the hall last time that you figured out my secret identity." Bridget recalled the night her father had his heart surgery and when her fist to the wall nearly cracked the hospital in two. "I mean, I've kept making efforts to meet with you, but I kept backing out it at the last second. Finally, I just decided that this was it. I was going to do it, but as far as my mother…" She paused trying to explain her feelings. "I guess I'm too scared to face her."

"Bridget…."

"You don't know how many scams I pulled to keep my family from discovering my powers." Bridget tugged off her cape to wrap around Liz and warm her. "I'm just afraid that… if I faced her, she wouldn't take me back, and besides…." She looked over secretly.

"What?"

"There's certain rules to being what I am now and sharing them with others." Bridget sighed. "Powerful rules going back centuries…" She looked back to Liz. "That's why you're an exception."

"But, honey…" Liz placed her hand to the young girl's face as if she was her own daughter. "Your mother knows your secret. So do your father, Kerry, Rory and your grandfather…." She looked into her eyes. "Just go home…"

"No…" Bridget answered. "I can't…." She shook her head. "The truth is they're all still struggling with it. Only you've accepted it. I can't read their minds, but… I know they're having a hard time fighting with the idea that… I've changed. I'm not just Bridget anymore."

"Bridget…" Liz pulled the girl's cape around her against the cold. "After you vanished, your mother had a mental breakdown and spent a few months in a mental hospital. She was hallucinating you everywhere. She thought you were home when you weren't. She thought she saw you where you wasn't…"

"I know…" The young girl in the Supergirl costume shed a tear. "And truth is, I do secretly check up on them from time to time…" She paced a bit and turned back. "But I didn't discover it until after she got out. I wish I could have been there for her, but…" She looked to the heavens. "I couldn't."

"Honey, what kind of power won't let you tell the truth?" Liz pleaded to her.

"Time, fate, destiny…." Bridget took her cape back to leave. "The same powers that keep the truth of Atlantis from being revealed, the truth behind life after death to the secrets of the pyramids… There are forces that are just beyond understanding in this world."

"So you've become a philosopher and a fan of existentialism then?"

"You could say that."

"And I suppose you don't want me telling your mother I saw you." Liz breathed into her hands and rubbed them against each other to keep warm.

"I'm trusting you on your own discretion there, doc…" Bridget slowly started rising off her feet. Liz started to turn back inside then turned back around.

"Bridget…" Liz looked up at her. "One last thing… I've got this young girl named Kaley… a cancer patient. She's in here a lot, and she's like one of your biggest fans."

"I can't go down there with my mother here." Bridget levitated a foot over the roof.

"She's in Room 415…" Liz smiled. "I know very well you can slip down there without being seen."

"You know me so well." Bridget lit up with a big grin. It was her favorite trick to just stand there and then vanish. Everyone froze in place to her eyes as Bridget raced through the hospital corridors in the space of a second. She recalled this place; finding one room on the fourth floor was not an impossible task. Files and papers in three nurses' stations blew up into the air, Oliver saw a brief flash of red and saw sudden footsteps in his mopped floor and five patients buzzed about the cold breeze. In Room 415, nine-year-old Kaley Miranda Davidson sat up drawing with crayons in her book. Her Supergirl drawings taped around her fluttered when the door to her room sounded. It sounded as if someone had opened and closed it really fast. She lifted her bandaged head up and looked up to the costumed girl in her room.

"Hi, sweetie…"

"It's you…" Kaley lit up with a grin full of tiny evenly spaced teeth. "I know it's you." She spoke with a tiny voice.

"That's right…." Bridget peeked quickly out the door. "My friend, Dr. Masterson, said you were my biggest fan."

"Do you like my pictures of you?"

"Are these your pictures?" Bridget came up by her bed. "Are you sure you didn't buy these?"

"Yeah…" Kaley shook her head giggling. "How long can you stay?"

"Only up until someone else needs me…."


	17. Chapter 17

17

"All Rise…" Bailiff Aaron Tuttle stood at his post. "Criminal Court Two is now in session, the honorable Harry T. Stone presiding." The former football player heralded the entry of Judge Harry Stone, the longest serving criminal circuit judge in Manhattan. The brawny African-American had replaced Bull Shannon much like several members of the court. Dan Fielding had retired with his wife to be replaced by Assistant District Attorney Brenda Walsh, formerly of the Public Defender's office. Billie Young was back to replace the former public defender position once served by Harry's wife, now on the Judicial Review Board. Even Roz had departed. She had retired herself after publishing a book on her experiences in the court system. Harry was now in the last months of his last judicial term and ready to retire himself and maybe move back to Boston to tease and cajole the gang at Cheers. Rumors were Sam and Rebecca just had their second little girl.

"Okay, Rick," Harry took his seat on the stand. "Who's up first?"

"Another underwear guy, sir…" Richard "Ricky" Cunningham Jr. was the son of movie director Richard Cunningham. The skinny red-haired clerk brought the arrest file up to the bench. "The people present Hector Jesus Dominguez, suspected burglary, possession, public mischief and public indecency."

Aaron and fellow bailiff Janice Bluth led out the short and stocky Hispanic gang member. Although his pants hung low, the back of his underwear had been pulled up over his head. He had sort of a permanent surprised look on his face. Dominguez briefly stood up against Harry's bench out of view, but Walsh and Young pulled him back into Harry's view.

"Another one?" Harry and Rich exchanged looks. "What is this girl's thing with underwear?" He looked back at Rich. "Rich, recall the old George Reeves series where he just bent bars around the bad guys."

"I remember it, sir…"

"Your honor…" Brenda spoke first. "Mr. Dominguez was found dangling from the electrical pole outside the home of Ed and Kate Harrison. His burglary tools with his fingerprints on them were found inside the house near a pillow case with several of the home-owner's possessions."

"Sir," Billie spoke up. "The defendant throws himself on the mercy of the court. He's seen the error of his ways."

"Yeah…" Harry continued. "Well, I'm still bumping him up the master court." Harry pounded his gavel, and Rick went to get the next case. Hector tightly turned to face Billie.

"Is that it?" He asked; he looked so pathetic with that underwear band over his head. "Is that it? That girl bounced me around the room for almost five minutes then hung me up like a piñata in front of the whole neighborhood. What about my anguish?"

"I'm sorry, Mr. Dominguez." Billie sympathized as Aaron came to take him away. "But maybe you ought to go straight."

"What?" Hector responded. "And get out of burglary?" Aaron tugged him away to lock-up. Rick meanwhile carried several cases up to Harry's side. He took the top one and read from it.

"Langdon Oswald Temple, car theft and evading arrest…"

Janice led out a skinny African-American kid wrapped in car tires. His arms were trapped down by his sides, and he had the same surprised look Hector had before him.

"Oh, look, she got creative with this one…" Harry and Langdon met each other. "What's the story here?"

"I didn't steal that car!" Landon tried pleading his case. "I was just driving along, and some blonde bimbo stopped me, pulled me out of the car and dribbled me up and down the highway."

"Don't forget how your screwdriver was in the ignition and the seventeen cars you smashed into trying to escape the police." Brenda added to his testimony.

"This is incredible." Harry loved the fact he had stayed in this job long enough to hear these stories of a stunning blonde in a Supergirl costume catching these criminals. "Is there anything this girl can't do?"

"You're honor…" Janice spoke up. "Do you know there's a fifty foot yacht blocking Times Square?"

"I stand corrected!"

Down on Times Square, police were redirecting traffic as the crane came through to hoist the yacht out of the way. Seven Arab extremists had been found on board, each of them with their underwear pulled over their heads or pinned together like sardines in the hold with enough explosives to blow up the Statue of Liberty. The bomb squad had cleared the boat of more explosives and Homeland Security arrested the seven terrorists. Mac Taylor was on the scene to represent the New York forensics lab. His man, Danny Messer, was on board to collect forensics as fast as he could while the yacht was getting ready to be hoisted on a truck and taken back to the harbor. He counted over a hundred bullet holes from automatic weapons through the craft, countless shells and deformed slugs strewn inside the yacht and damage that possibly cost hundreds of dollars to fix once again. He pulled a long blonde hair from a curtain and bottled it. Chances were he was not going to get DNA from it if was indestructible. He also had fingerprints on the bent rifles. Chances were they would match the prints from the other case and several other mystery blonde cases in town.

"Danny, they're ready to haul." Mac patted the side to get him off.

"On my way!" Danny packed the evidence he had got and hurried for the deck, swinging his leg off the side as the city employees gestured to start hauling away back to the harbor. Climbing down the ladder, he hopped off six feet off the ground in front of Mac.

"Three guesses who dropped our guests here." He riddled. Mac exhaled a bit.

"You mean to tell me…" Mac walked away from the noise of the winch hoisting the fifty-ton craft but still had to raise his voice. "That a super strong blonde wearing a comic book costume who can fly left this boat here?" He looked around the pedestrians and on-lookers watching the spectacle. "If so, then where did she go?"

"Well, she couldn't have gone far…" Detective Don Flack was a few feet away. "NYPD has had a helicopter over head ever since she landed, and we've yet to see her go airborne."

They perused the crowds for blondes in psychedelic red, blew and yellow costumes.

"Ah…." Garbed in a black turtleneck and a green skirt, Bridget sat in MacLaren's Bar and Grill a few blocks away. "That hits the spot." She sipped her iced soda and took a bite from her club sandwich. Her ears listened half-interestedly to the police cars racing past the place, but they seemed to have it. Turning back to take another bite of her sandwich, she became aware of someone in her space. A guy had approached her. He was dressed dapperly in an expensive suit and shined business shoes. He suavely adjusted his tie, strolled casually toward her and mentally dressed her from her sweater and long skirt. Bridget took the second to last bite of her sandwich and awaited the pick-up line.

"Allow me to introduce my self…" He faked a British accent. "Stinson… Barney Stinson of Her Majesty's Secret Service, and you are the most beautiful woman I have ever seen."

Bridget grimaced a big smile on her face and sipped her drink. Her grin turned into a giggle and then she started laughing hysterically.

"That's it?" She couldn't believe it. Her eyes started watering as she broke up. "Oh, my god!" She checked her bill and pulled a ten and a five-dollar bill from her purse to cover it, the whole time her laughter echoed through the tavern uproariously. "That's the most lame…" She was still giggling as Barney looked around the faces staring at him. "That's got to be the lamest…" She started laughing again, picking up her purse as she continued to break up laughing. "He actually thought I was going to…." She started laughing louder now as she held her abdomen. She pushed her way out through the throng of bar patrons as her laughter briefly dimmed then sounded louder than before. Barney just stood in shocked surprise. What went wrong? He turned to his best friends at their regular table.

"Ted, you're supposed to be my wing-man!"


	18. Chapter 18

18

Having spent much the night over Canadian air space and briefly over the North Pole, Bridget was passing through the airspace over Hastings, Montana when the radio signals broadcasting the Amber Alert for seven-year-old Lottie Gutierrez went out over the radio and television. The beautiful dark-haired girl had just ran down to the corner market on her street and after an hour, her distracted mother realized her child was not back and safe. Checking with her daughter's friend, Carla Gutierrez ran up and down the street alerting all her friends, and when her husband came home, she was already hysterical and screaming.

Out on Highway 12 at the Schuster Brothers Wrecking Yard, part-time employee Miguel DeJesus pulled into the yard and drive straight for the car crusher on the property. Flicking a joint from his mouth to the ground as he turned off the engine and got out of the driver's seat, he looked around the lot of wrecked cars stacked five and eight high in a maze around him and wandered directly and emphatically for the trunk of his far. Unlocking the back with his keys, his brown skinny arms opened his trunk and his hands reached down and lifted up a rolled up rug from his mother's house bound and taped in a bundle with duct tape. He had done seven of twenty years for the rape and attempted murder of a girl in Brooklyn, New York. He wasn't letting another girl slip away that couldn't keep a secret and what luck, there was already a stripped Oldsmobile in the crusher. Kids were getting killed in junkyards all the time. Tossing the bundle in the back window, he casually turned around with a scowl on his unholy Hispanic features and descended into the operator's booth. The key to switch the crusher on wasn't there, but it couldn't be that different than hotwiring a car. Two spliced wires, the bandana on his head to wipe his fingerprints away and the machine was accidentally left running. Several tons of hydraulic force started caving the scrap iron of another car together as he pulled another handmade joint from his pants pocket. As he turned toward his car, the humming noise of the hydraulic press stopped, the crunching of metal ceased and squealing hydraulics started screaming.

The joint dropped from his thin lip as he turned around.

Her feet on the floor of the crusher, Bridget caught the top lid of the machine in her fingers then flipped her hands under it with her shoulder to start lifting it up. Ten tons were coming down on the car; she had lifted much more. Her presence had stopped this brutal machine, but struggling against it was causing oil lines to pop off and dance around like dancing snakes, the hydraulic press had never tried fighting anyone with the power of a god. Teeth gritting together, eyes squinting, the blonde maiden of might fought to push the huge top hinge of the car crusher back on itself. Holding it back with her left arm and shoulder, her right hand grabbed the back door of the Oldsmobile and ripped it off. Watching it sail fifty feet across the yard, Miguel stopped staring and shaking his head with his mouth open and dashed to his car, pulling the car door open and rushing to get his keys in the ignition. He looked back to see where he was backing as his car suddenly lurched to a stop. He looked forward again and saw Bridget looking straight at him through his dirty windshield; her face was not happy.

Feeling his car tipping backward, Miguel struggled to open his car door, but the stress of the bending car had warped it shut. It was already straight up on its trunk when he dived for the open passenger side window and was then smacked into the ceiling as the car finished flipping over. As he crawled out, two bright red boots came to meet him and two dainty female hands lifted him off his feet.

"You're not real! You can't be real!" Miguel was screaming out of fear for the first time in his life in his thick Mexican accent.

"Hi, pookie…" Bridget shined to him. "Do you want a girlfriend? Well, good news, by this time next month, you'll be dating a seven foot tall skinhead and sharing a room with him in prison." A cute little evil grin from Bridget and a dash of images sped by too fast for his mind to register, Miguel felt his underwear pulled up over his head and his external male anatomy driven deep into his body. The Montana State Police would borrow a truck from the phone company to pull him off the neon sign of the local movie theater. Although dosed with a near fatal dose of drugs, tiny Lottie was returned to the grateful arms of her pining mother.

On the west side of Chicago, police chief Don Kowalski donned battle gear and a bullet proof jacket to join David Rossi, Derek Morgan and Eliot Reid of the FBI's Behavioral Analysis Unit to capture Federal outlaw Ty Haggerty, the leader of the anti-government Sons of the Confederacy terrorist group. The underground group was filled with members of the Ku Klux Klan, wanted criminals and several disenchanted former Americans who did nothing but complain about the government and nothing to do anything to change the system but strong-arm their own candidate into the Chicago mayoral race and kill off two police detectives investigating them. The BAU also had evidence linking to them one of the largest drug and marijuana rings in North Illinois. Expecting a fire fight, the Chicago Police Department along with SWAT and the three FBI agents raced to the deserted motel on the edge of town with their warrant to arrest Haggerty and take him down. Motorists watched the flashing lights and speeding police vans on Highway 41. They stormed the courtyard of the motel and rushed to their places with military precisions. Kowalski was there as SWAT took their places.

"Ty Haggerty…" Chief Kolwalski stood behind the SWAT team in their battle shields as he made the arrest. "We have a warrant for your arrest! Come out, with your hands up!"

Inside Room 17 on the bottom floor, Haggerty grinned with an evil grin. He had an inside man in the police department and knew they were coming. Armed with enough weapons to seize a small country, he had loyal Sons of the Confederacy in all the rooms around the courtyard. This was going to be a bloodbath, and he was taking as many of them out first. On his signal, the battle broke out as shots rained down across the courtyard. Surprised police officers ducked for cover as Rossi took a shot. Another officer went down. Automatic weapons sprayed the officers hiding from the sudden war zone they were unprepared for. It was just another war in the battle against organized crime, and Haggerty had no problem taking out police officers. He proved that when he gave the order to take out those detectives. People were going to be reading about him for years after he was gone. He was seeing himself as a patriot who took down a fascist government. One of his lieutenants took a flash grenade from a crate stolen from the police weapons locker to blind the police from the slaughter to come; he tossed it over the balcony and saw it caught in mid-air by a blonde charging straight from him.

"Shots fired! Shots fired!" Kolwalski screamed into his radio. "Back up! We need back up!" Several blocks away, his daughter, Abby Kowalski of Internal Affairs heard the calls, spun her car around and went speeding to her father's rescue. One of the upstairs apartments exploded with a flash grenade, and then out the side of his eye, he saw one of the shooters flung off the balcony and a bent rifle landing and skidding toward him. Right on top of him, two more gunmen were slammed together and tossed off the balcony. A blue blur was rushing just over their heads on the balcony, tossing men with guns and damaged rifles in different directions. Elliot Reid blinked and looked again. As he watched, one crazy redneck turned to shoot his blonde attacker, was punched fast and hard twice to the chest and tossed off to the police into the hard concrete from twelve feet over it.

"But that's impossible…" He watched as one by one the terrorist group was getting taken out by a blonde in a trick-or-treat costume moving at nearly the speed of light. Rossi and Morgan from the BAU were turning around trying to keep up with her image speeding by over him. Anyone who wasn't a police officer was flying off the second floor of the hotel and landing in the courtyard after getting struck with their weapon or violently punched to the chest with the force of a two hundred pound bag of flour. Reid had publicly denied the existence of this girl for five years since her first appearance in Detroit, and now, he was humbled in her presence. Forty-three members of the anti-government terrorist group were taken out in less than a minute, fifty-two automatic weapons were bent into scrap metal around the Chicago Police Department and Haggerty himself was tossed through his main floor apartment with his underwear pulled over his head and ponytail tied into a gag in his mouth. Rossi stood over him gun drawn to arrest him; Haggerty's supporters were lying around him with broken bones and concussions fighting to breath as they were arrested. Reid's jaw hung open as he watched Bridget streaking away up into the light blue sky and vanishing into the south sky. As she approached the St. Louis, Missouri, the captivating blonde heard a chirping from close to her ear. One arm balanced on the southern hemisphere, she tapped on her cell phone and placed a phone bud to her left ear.

"Talk to me…" She spoke.

"Hi, Penny…" Bernadette's perky cartoon voice spoke from her Pasadena apartment. "How you doing?"

"Just flying around…" Bridget grinned at the double meaning of the phrase.

"What?" All Bernadette heard was white noise and turbulence. It sounded as if the girl she knew as Penny Parker was driving on the freeway in a convertible with the roof down on the car. "I can't hear you."

"Hang on…" Bridget stopped in the air space over the corner of Northeast Oklahoma. As she appeared in the radar of nearby McClellan Air Base, flight recorders suddenly picked her up on satellite and lost her as she dove upward into the atmosphere. A few more minutes and satellite imaging computers would be trying to take pictures of her. The last time they started tracking her, they got as closed as fifteen feet and got a red and blue blob with a smaller blonde orb as her psychic aura disrupted their photographic technology. Bernadette meanwhile scowled with adorable confusion and looked to Howard with her in her apartment. Her eyes rolled with perplexed disarray, and her dainty red lips contorted into a perturbed scowl. Howard noticed her distress.

"What's the matter?" He asked.

"Sounds like she in the wind tunnel at the university." She answered and held the phone up to Howard as the crackling and popping inference around Penny reached a crescendo and slowly died away as Bridget reached the dark blue and light violet region of the atmosphere between the clouds and outer space. Most ground radar systems didn't reach this high, but nearly all the military satellites could find her within five minutes. Leveling off, Bridget hesitated in hover status and cupped her left hand over her ear bud.

"What's up?" Bridget responded.

"Oh…" Bernadette replaced her cell phone to her ear. "I was wondering if you and Leonard would like to join Howard and I on a double date with us. We were going to see the new Tom Cruise movie and maybe catch dinner."

"Sounds great…" The last time Bridget tried to date Leonard she was interrupted by a shoot-out in Los Angeles. "But… uh…" She paused to mentally discern anything that demanded her attention from future events. "Did you ask Leonard if he's available?"

"He's breaking out his new cologne as we speak." Bernadette impishly nodded her head in excitement with an anxious delighted grin rushing to her cheeks.

"I'll be there." Penny tapped off her phone on her belt and removed her ear bud as she dived to earth to reach nearly sub-sonic speeds in the atmosphere. A blast of noise crackled over Bernadette's phone suddenly that distracted Howard before switching itself off. He looked up from the explosion of noise to his girlfriend.

"What kind of car is she driving?" Bernadette asked out loud.

"Sounds like she's trying to wedge the space shuttle into the McDonald's drive-thru." Howard mumbled with a light chuckle. A quarter of the country away, Bridget once again escaped the United States Military from capturing her existence on radar. Over north Texas, Dallas councilwoman Sue Ellen Sheppard, the ex-wife of former oil baron J.R. Ewing casually glanced out the window of her small charter plane and then looked again as Bridget dipped down from over her and vanished into the clouds below her.

In the small prairie community of Drum Ridge ear Tucumcari, New Mexico, two Iowa pickers named Mike and Frank were picking through the antique toy collection of Walton Toplinger on his horse farm. Mike reached in and found a vintage Supergirl figure from the Seventies just as Bridget streaked through the northern sky over the ranch. All three of their heads turned in unison to the sight of her, but Mike and Frank looked at each and just shrugged it off.

In Phoenix, Arizona, former waitress Vera Gorman-Novak sat in the park and waited to reunite with her old friend, Alice Hyatt, in the old park. The two of them had once worked at the old Mel's Diner out on Grand Avenue near the highway, but the site was long gone, and Alice and Vera always got together and talked about the old days as Alice's musical repertoire came through the area. Briefly looking up, Vera noticed the distant red streak of a blonde soaring from east to west in the distance within a few seconds and stood surprised. Her fifteen-year-old son, Kenny, was right! There was a real superhero in the world, and she was not the only one to see her.

In Albuquerque, New Mexico, police detective Grace Hanadarko pushed another perp into a mailbox and cuffed him before shoving Lionel Favreau into a police car. The nineteen-year-old Mexican-African American pimp and narcotics dealer was wanted in questioning for the street side shooting and murder of a prostitute named Brandy White, known on the street as White Chocolate. Pushed against the mailbox, his head just happened to look up and see Bridget flying over the city and then vanishing to the west. Grace must have seen her too because she told Favreau that Bridget was going to return and beat him up if he didn't tell her what he knew in the murder of the prostitute.

Outside Gold and Silver Pawn in Las Vegas, pawn broker Rick Harrison and his employee, Austin Russell, were looking over a vintage 1959 azure blue Ford sedan from the garage of Blake Atwater. Blake's brother, Ty, had restored the car and left it to him, but now, he just wanted what it was worth. As he and Rick dickered and negotiated the price of the car, the skies were cleaved by the presence of the maiden of might passing from east to west nearly right over the street. Bridget had banked north toward the city to hold her speed around a storm in the California Sierra Madre and then resume her course southwesterly for Pasadena, Upon seeing her, Rick cursed himself for not getting a picture of her in flight, but Austin "Chumley" Russell just grinned lackadaisically and referenced her as his girlfriend. It wasn't true, but who was going to believe him.

Bridget had just passed Barstow, California and was nearing the northern climbs of the greater Los Angeles area as a million sounds started invading her senses. One by one, the sounds of the large metropolitan city were getting sorted and ignored through her mind. A million noises at once ranging from voices, sirens, cars, conversations, engines and machines humming, dogs barking, radios, TV signals, ambient noises, white noises, all of them either getting passed or briefly acknowledged by her higher brain functions. Among them, the sound of someone in emotional torment attracted her interest. She was just eighty miles from her apartment. Who was crying and blubbering the name of her public identity with such emotional intensity?

"Please don't be Lily." Jackson Stewart sat on the roof outside his bedroom of his Malibu ranch house. "Please don't be Lily…" His face was red. His eyes were puffy. Since his sister's dorky best friend convinced him that she was really his superhuman infatuation, he had gone from disbelief to anger and now complete depression. He had to know the truth. He couldn't even go into the Supergirl chat rooms and look at the new photos coming in because all he saw was Lily's face in them. He never really liked that girl. He tolerated her in small doses, but she was practically his other little sister, and having her ruin his infatuation was the cruelest blow since Miley and Lily revealed to his classmates he used to carry a Monkees lunch box to school.

"Supergirl, where are you?" Jackson scanned the skies around the house once more. "Please don't be Lily."

Inside the house, his father, Robby Ray Stewart, looked at Miley and Lily sitting and grinning on the sofa over their prank. Robby feared he'd have to go up on the roof and try and pull Jackson back down.

"Please don't be Lily…" Jackson wailed once more.

"For the love of God, Jackson, please get a life." Bridget stepped on to the roof behind Jackson and leaned on the chimney. Jerking his head around, Jackson reacted suddenly and started sliding off the roof just as Bridget knelt and grabbed him by the top of his pants and pulled him up to sit next to her feet on the top of the roof. His eyes blinked and blinked again, his jaw dropped and he forgot anyone named Lily ever existed. She was real, and she was more beautiful in person than he ever thought.

Why did all the newspapers claim she resembled Reese Witherspoon?

"Look, sweetie…" Bridget lightly grinned and patted his back to comfort him. "Lily doesn't get a lot of recognition being in your sister's Hannah Montana shadow. Every once in a while, she needs to do something to make herself feel special."

"You know my sister's Hannah Montana?!"

"Well, yeah…" Bridget postured a bit. "Look, I know she annoys you, but let her have this. Come on, get off the roof and go get a girlfriend... A real one..."

"I want you!" Jackson struggled to stand up on the roof with the winds off the coast threatening to blow him off. He could seen miles of the wooded property and grounds beyond, but all he wanted to do was be with Bridget as she levitated up and off the roof of his house in the empty space over the front yard. "Please… be my girlfriend!" He reached out to her. "Let's go out on a date…"

Bridget grinned and chuckled a bit and admired his plucky determination.

"Oh, sweetie…" Grinning at his hero worship, Bridget began levitating high off the roof and drifting off of it. "Look, you're cute, but this job is 24/7… I barely get a chance to eat lunch…"

"Jackson!" Robby Ray stepped out of the house to yell at his son to get off the roof, then slowly dropped his jaw to see Bridget in her red, blue and yellow wave good-bye to him and lift off toward Pasadena.


	19. Chapter 19

19

Entering the basement of her apartment building Los Robles Avenue through an old underground access tunnel and then levitating up to her floor through the ruined elevator shaft, Bridget peeked out of the shaft first before entering her apartment. She had snuck back home successfully once again, changed clothes and was in a nice jacket and dress when Howard and Bernadette came by to take her and Leonard off to dinner. In true Sheldon fashion, Dr. Cooper failed to understand their motives or their intentions to dine without him and tried to tag along, even going as far as having Raj accompany him as his other to force his way into their double date. Howard, however, was prepared for this. He had Raj take Sheldon for pizza at the local Giacomo's Pizza Place then covertly secreted the four of his company off to dinner at the Worsham's in nearby Echo Park. At the end of the evening, they all feigned ignorance of their duplicity to ditch Sheldon, but Raj immediately got it and wanted a triple date as soon as he eventually and hopefully got a girlfriend or his sister Priya came for a visit. Bridget and Leonard meanwhile felt an emotional tie once again, and this time it wasn't interrupted by Bridget vanishing from the room for twelve to fifteen minutes to powder her nose or make a phone call. Leonard never questioned the transparency of her lies; he was just glad to be around her in a social setting. By the following day, he was still dreaming of being her number one even as Sheldon filled his life with more meandering diatribe over the versions of fictional characters from a non-existent universe.

"How can you not like Val Kilmer as Batman?" Raj was stuck in another Sheldon debate.

"Show me in the DC Universe one place where Batman's body armor has nipples on it!" Sheldon followed behind them on the stairs of their apartment building as they descended down to the lobby.

"Why are we still debating this?" Howard came down before the two. "Look, Christian Bale is the first guy to play Batman in more than two movies. He practically helped reawaken the franchise after George Clooney."

"I didn't think Clooney was that bad." Leonard mumbled out loud. "I mean, if he had Tim Burton's vision and direction and someone other than Uma Thurman as…"

"Dude, please tell me you're not knocking Uma Thurman…" They descended to the second floor. "She was the only thing worth seeing in that movie."

"Two words,…" Howard sounded upset. "Alicia Silverstone! She's way hotter than Uma Thurman."

"Why are we even mentioning Batman Four?" Sheldon spoke up. "Christian Bale defined the Batman character more than anyone else."

"But only after Tim Burton did all the hard work to develop Batman for the movies." Leonard spoke up. "And besides, I think Christian Bale's version is too talky."

"Too talky?" Howard looked at him. "What do you mean by that?"

"I like my Batman to be silent and brooding." Leonard added. "Look, all I'm saying is that Michael Keaton under Tim Burton's direction was the best overall Batman." Leonard debated.

"In what universe?" Raj argued back.

"Can we all agree that George Clooney's version was way below beneath even Adam West?" Sheldon iterated.

"Agreed!"

Howard suddenly stopped, drew silent and noticed an attractive redhead enter the building. Leonard and Raj noticed her as well, and Sheldon about to speak noticed their distraction and rolled his eyes in exasperated silence. Dressed in form-fitting khakis with a light blue dress jacket, the twenty-something beauty crossed the bottom of the stairs below them, passed through the entry hall and stood studying the mailboxes for a second. Howard's heart was beating faster for her female shape and her cascading curly red locks, but his brain was also finding her familiar and it wasn't until she turned around that he realized he was right.

"Kerry?"

"Howard?" Kerry shined a grin to him and gave him a peck to the cheek. "Oh my god…" They recognized each other from their on-line photos and came together to realize their familiarity with each other.

"What are you doing here?" The suave engineer was entranced to see her beauty in person.

"Well, I'm here looking…"

"Howard…" Leonard was also entranced by the crimson-haired Detroit native. "Don't be stingy. Who's your friend?" Raj meanwhile fell back into his selective mutism before Kerry while Sheldon once again rolled his eyes in annoyed derision at their distraction of the opposite sex.

"Oh, this is Kerry…" Howard was barely remembering he had a girlfriend right now. "She's a friend from my Supergirl chat site. Kerry, these are my friends, Leonard and Howard, and that's Sheldon."

"Hi…" Kerry smiled demurely to meet Howard in presence. Meeting him in person was a mere lark, a chance of fate. She was in Los Angeles with her employer and mentor, Elaine Flockhart, in only an unofficial capacity to represent a client trying to claim a reputed family member's inheritance. On the side, she was tracking down Bridget. A credit search revealed that Bridget owned this building as Linda Kent as well as the restaurant where she pretended to have a job. A waitress at the restaurant, Bernadette Rostenkowski, even further identified Bridget as her best friend and gave Kerry this address. Hoping to pretend to be the cousin of Penny Parker from Detroit, Kerry anxiously and nervously built up the nerve to finally confront her sister in person.

"So, Kerry," Leonard grinned to meet Kerry. "What do you do for a living?" He tried to impress her. "I'm a physicist."

"Oh…" Kerry was a bit unprepared to be hit on. "Uh, I'm a third year law student studying to be a lawyer."

"A lawyer…" Sheldon said it as if it wasn't a real word. "And your parents aren't offended that you're in such a low-earning career choice."

Kerry slowly turned her head to him and tried to figure him out in her head.

"Don't mind him…" Leonard tried to apologize. "He's socially-challenged."

"He sounds crazy to me."

"I'm not crazy." Sheldon looked upset. "My mother had me tested!"

Raj grinned and smelled her perfume. Kerry suddenly felt as if she was in a bad TV series on the Fox Network.

"Anyway…" Kerry tried to remain cordial. "I'm here to visit someone." She paused. "Penny Parker?"

"She lives right across from us." Leonard wanted to escort her.

"Are we going to the comic book store?" Sheldon interrupted.

"Let me show you the way." Leonard turned to walk with Kerry up the stairs.

"Wait a minute, she's my friend…" Howard and Raj went behind them.

"Apparently not…" Sheldon noticed the guys heading back up the stairs led by their hormones stimulated by the opposite sex and sighed defeatedly. He could leave them behind and go on without them, but he didn't drive and he wasn't allowed on the bus.

"So, Kerry," Leonard grinned to her on the second floor landing. "How do you know Penny?"

"It's kind of complicated." Kerry passed the second floor elevator doors and ascended the stairs to the third floor. She was slowly realizing the guys were enchanted to her and looked away secretly to appreciate the attention. As she looked to Raj, he alighted a big harmless grin at her and struggled with trying to know how to act around Penny's friend.

"Doesn't he talk?" They ascended the stairs around the elevator shaft and reached the third floor.

"He can, but he doesn't." Leonard responded.

"He has selective mutism." Sheldon spoke up a bit annoyed. "He can't talk around girls."

"Did Bridge… I mean, Penny do something to him."

"No, he's never been able to talk around girls." Howard stepped on the fourth floor first. "So, this is it…" He gestured to the door of Penny's apartment.

"Now that she has found her way," Sheldon once again tried to retain what power he thought he had over this group. "We will proceed to the comic book store to…" He watched as Howard knocked on Penny's door for Kerry. "And I guess not…"

Howard knocked again.

"Penny…" Sheldon mumbled uncontrollably, and Howard, Leonard, Raj and Kerry confusingly turned their heads to him in unison again to realize his OCD. In the apartment, Bridget sat on her bed rubbing and massaging her feet and catching her breath after a busy week. Major disasters were few and far between, but she'd had no visions of anything the police couldn't handle. Tired and hesitantly, she sighed briefly and rose after hearing the first knock and looked to the door to answer it on the second knock. As she crossed her living room, she heard the voices of the guys talking through the door.

"Do you think she's home?" Kerry asked Leonard.

"Oh, yeah…" Leonard spoke up. "Today's her day off from the Cheesecake Factory. She's almost always home."

"Cheesecake Factory?"

"Yeah," Howard beamed back to Kerry. "Yeah, she kind of works there." He grinned at her. "So, Kerry, do you have a boyfriend?"

"Why would you ask that?"

Inside the apartment, Bridget stopped and huddled behind the door. That was Kerry's voice! What was she doing here? Of all the times to show up, why did it have to be now? She froze trying to figure out her next move. She could duck out to avoid her, but her costume was down in the washing machine in the basement with her laundry and her next spare costume was in a secret room at Universal Studios.

"She's sure taking a long time answering the door." Kerry noticed.

"I know she's home." Sheldon spoke up. "I heard her get off her sofa."

"Damn his Vulcan ears!" Bridget screamed internally in her head. Her hesitancy turned to defeat, and she mentally and emotionally surrendered. "I'm sorry, Kerry…" She bemoaned under breath for what she was about to do to her sister. She postured a bit and reached to open the door.

"Hi, guys!" Her voice turned chipper and upbeat. "What's up?" She looked at Howard, Kerry and Leonard. Sheldon stood behind them at the elevator waiting to go to the comic book shop. Raj as usual was struck silent in her presence. Kerry's eyes alighted to finally find her sister. Just like Raj, she was struck silent in front of her. "Who's your friend?"

"What do mean who's our friend?" Leonard reacted confused. "Kerry, I thought you said you knew Penny."

Sheldon suddenly drew interested.

"Well, this suddenly turned not so boring after all!"

"Hi?" Kerry quickly forgot her deception upon facing her sister face to face after all these years apart and forced herself to speak. She had rehearsed this in her head. Originally, she was going to reach out and hug her sister and beg her to come home, but instead, her buried rage and angry feelings came back to her. She loved her sister, and wanted her back in her life, but all her buried anger raged back and came through her lips before she could stop them. "Hi? Is that all you can say?!"

"Uh…" Confused and unprepared, Bridget tried to keep up her deception to the confused faces of the guys. "Um… Hi-dokliy-okily?" She reacted as perplexed and mystified as the guys.

"Do you realize, Bridget, just how long I've been looking for you?" Kerry forced a gasp of relief. "I don't know if I should hit you or hug you." She felt a wave of relief coming over her. "I've missed you so much!" She reached out and hugged her sister and held on to her as tears came from her eyes. Bridget made her best confounded look and reacted unprepared which she actually was. She was not expecting Kerry to have a breakdown in front of the guys. Behind Kerry's back, she mystifyingly pointed at her and looked to the guys as if they had a better idea what was going on here.

"What just happened here?" Howard asked out loud.

"I'm not sure." Leonard was struck mute by the turn of events.

"Okay," Sheldon checked his watch. "In five minutes, I'm going to the comic book store whether you guys are with me or not."

"Sweetie…" Bridget continued acting aloof and even briefly rubbed Kerry's back. "I don't want to hurt your feelings, but… who do you think I am?" She reacted carefully to hide her identity not just from her sister but also from the guys.

"Bridget, please…" Kerry sniffed and looked from Howard and Leonard and back to Bridget. "Don't do this to me. I know why you're doing it, but just… don't send me away."

"Kerry…" Howard stopped trying to charm the attractive redhead. "Who do you think Penny is? Who's Bridget?"

"My sister…" Kerry confused. "Tell them, Bridget. Please tell them!"

Raj whispered in Howard's ear.

"No, I don't know what's going on either!" Howard snapped at his best friend.

Bridget just there with her mouth open trying to think of something to say. Her heart went out to Kerry, and she wanted to tell the truth, but this was too much to explain to too many people right now. Especially Leonard and the guys…

"You think Penny is your sister, Bridget?" Leonard spoke up. "Kerry, we've known Penny a long time…"

"Three years, five months and twenty-three days…" Sheldon spoke up.

"We've met her parents and her sister, Sabrina…" Leonard continued and recalled ruses and faked identities he believed were true. "I don't see how could she be related to you."

"Actually," Sheldon stepped forward. "Considering that Michigan was settled by mostly German settlers whose descendants would have emigrated to Nebraska, there is a very good chance that Penny and Kerry share a common ancestor." He stepped forward to take over the confusion. "Individuals of the same family tree are very much more likely to look alike. It was even used as a plot device in several old Sixties and Seventies TV shows."

"Sheldon…" Leonard groaned at his relentless and unwanted scientific observation.

"No," Kerry and Bridget locked eyes again. "Bridget… Please tell them who you are."

"I'm sorry, Terri, but…"

"Kerry!" Kerry screamed at her. "My name is Kerry! Kerry Hennessy!" She turned away from the door and pressed the button for the elevator trying to leave their confused faces then noticed the out of order sign. "Oh, what's the use?!" She looked back at the guys upset and emotional. "Why did I think this time was going to be any different?! You've conned me from the start, and you're still doing it!" Her breath started coming faster, her eyes filling with tears. "Now, you've just got more people to help you do it!" She turned and ran down the stairs bawling her eyes out; her heart was heavy with regret and pain as her feet carried her down the stairs.

"Whoa!" Howard was first to speak. "What the hell was that?" Internally, he was considering himself lucky to have not gotten into a relationship with that one.

"Penny," Leonard turned to Bridget. "She really thought you were her sister."

"I feel so sorry for her." Bridget told the truth. "I wish I could have helped her, but…" She reacted speechless and let the guys fill in the rest. Raj whispered in Howard's ear.

"Yes, we're still going to the comic book store!" Howard answered his query. Raj now drew quiet. Deep down, Bridget felt horrible. What could she do? How else could she have handled that? She looked down the stairs wanting to chase after her, but how would she explain her actions to the guys. They knew her as Penny Parker, a struggling actress from Nebraska. That had been her cover identity for over three years. How could she accept her sister in front of her and explain her existence. She looked to the guys and pulled her long blonde hair back.

"Excuse me, guys…" Her voice was slow and emotional. "But I've got to get my laundry."

Down stairs, Kerry stormed out of the apartment embarrassed, distraught and confused. She wasn't sure what to think. Her research and methodology was perfect… flawless. There was no doubt in her mind that Bridget and Penny were one and the same, but she saw the look in Penny's face. She did not know her. Was it an act or was it some kind of amnesia? She tried to flag down a cab from the curb that passed her without stopping. She flagged another one that pulled to the curb between two of the trees lining the sidewalk. The brakes on the blue cab squealed as they pulled up on her.

"Where to?" Cab driver Jimmy Karlen looked to Kerry getting in his back seat. It was nice and clean. Most cans were littered with debris or stained from hundreds of passengers. The seats were a light bluish-gray and a light in the ceiling lit up and went out as Kerry closed the door. Looking up with tears strewn-eyes, Kerry tried to choke back her pain and unhappiness.

"Tipton Hotel on Alhambra…" Her voice cracked with thick emotion. Pushing his flag down, Jimmy felt sorry for the girl. She looked about his daughter Halley's age. The tears were probably over a boy. He wanted to comfort her as one father looking over another daughter, but as he looked back to Kerry in the back seat, he noticed Kerry pull out her cell phone and hit a number. Bouncing from cell tower to satellite and then to a Detroit cell tower, the distressed and flustered redhead pined and trembled with unending trepidation. She had come all this way to face her sister. What had happened?

"Hi, this is Cate…" Her mother cell phone sent her to voice mail. "Leave me a message." The recording beeped. Her mother had to be on the clock at the hospital.

"Mom, I found Bridget…" Kerry responded with tears of mourning going down her face as her head collapsed against the door. "I think… but she did it to me again… She didn't want to talk to me. She practically tossed me out of her apartment and pretended she didn't know me. Please call me." She signed off and placed her phone back in her purse. Jimmy looked at her again.

"Is it a boy?" He wanted to help.

"If only it was that simple." Kerry commiserated. It was an eighteen-minute ride back to her hotel. Jimmy took the side roads around the highway and only got hit by a few lights. A few nice neighborhoods passed by them along with several of the same kind of businesses that Kerry had back home. In fact, if she didn't know better, she could have been in the Greenlawn area of Detroit. Jimmy tried to be helpful, and Kerry responded politely, but her mind was a million miles away wanting to move on without Bridget in her life. It was time to forget about her. As far as things were concerned, her sister died the night she watched her vanish into the rainy night sky those years before. As her hotel reared up, Kerry checked the meter and pulled twenty dollars to cover her 14.75 ride. Before the hotel, a bellboy opened her cab for her, and Kerry faked a grin to him then glided into the lobby behind a young man with his date. Pulling her hotel key from her purse, Kerry went straight for the elevators and slipped into the first one that opened, hitting the button for the fourteenth floor without paying much attention.

After her twelve-second vertical ascent, the doors opened again to another floor and Kerry marched forward in a daze. Her sister was gone. She never existed. Her life was moving on. She scanned her key to her room around the corner and entered, swinging the door behind her. Once inside, she collapsed in her chair emotionally spent, but the tears started again and kept coming. Holding her face, her legs awkwardly spread apart down from her knees, she cried and wept with tears running down her face and her chest pounding with sorrow. Her eyes were full of sadness and lonely sorrow. It was so hard to let go. She found her sister, or did she? Who the hell was Penny Parker, and why the hell did she look exactly like Bridget? She had parents. She had a sister. Where was Bridget?

"Kerry?"

The anguished redhead slowly looked up to the breeze from the open window. Standing in the flapping curtain before the window, Bridget stood there in her red and blues. The huge red "S" across her chest, the cape from her shoulders, she stood before her sister as she was.

"I'm sorry, Care Bear," Bridget's eyes were tearing up as well. "I didn't want to do that, but… I couldn't let Leonard and the guys know my secret."

Kerry's mouth dropped open to be looking once more at her sister. She was both scared and in awe. Slightly trembling, she tried to talk. Her heart was beating faster and faster, and then, her eyes rolled back and her body fell forward from the chair unconscious.


	20. Chapter 20

20

In 1990, Kerry had been five years old. At the time, Bridget was six years old. The two adorable pixies with the blonde and red hair charmed a lot of adults. During those days, their father was a traveling television sports reporter, and their mother was a full time mom. Rory was a two-year-old problem child restricted to a play pen as his older sisters played in the backyard and ran in and out of the garage of their home on Maple.

"Kerry, let's play cowboys and Indians."

"Okay." In those days Kerry with the pigtails idolized her big sister.

"I'll be the Indians…" Bridget pushed Kerry into the kiddy chair in the garage and found the leftover twine from the clothesline. "You'll be the cowboys before we scalp them…" Little Bridget with the unbrushed blonde hair tied the end of the twine to the chair then started running around her little sister to bind her to the seat. Giggling through her toothless grin, Kerry giggled and cooed. Her sister was playing with her! These were some of her best and favorite memories of her childhood. Surrounded by the boxes of the garage as Bridget raced around her chanting a nonsensical and stereotyped version of a Native American chant. Kerry just giggled. Running out of twine, the blonde older sister looked down at the little red-haired sister that ruined her being an only child.

"Time for all that red hair to go…"

"Okay…" Kerry didn't know what was going on was meant to ruin her nice looks. All she knew was that her sister was playing with her. That was the most important thing. Looking over the workbench in the garage, Bridget chanced on a pair of heavy iron sisters then became distracted by something else. Somewhere near the house, a police siren sounded. Bridget responded to it.

"Gotta go…" Bridget raced down the driveway in her yellow t-shirt and blue pants, turning at the hedge against the McGruder family next door, she vanished from the property as Kerry sat tied to the chair alone. Bound to her seat, left alone, she looked around for her sister.

"Bridget…" She asked out loud. "Bridget?" She started squirming under all the twine. "Bridget, come back…."

Kerry opened her eyes. She wasn't five years old; she was twenty-four. She was a grown woman and an assistant lawyer for one of Detroit's top corporate attorney firms. She hadn't dreamed she was a kid in a long time. That wasn't exactly how that incident had happened either. In the real world, Bridget had run and hid in the bushes after hearing her mother calling them. It was her mother who had untied her, and Bridget had a rash for two weeks after hiding in poison ivy. Kerry gasped and tried to recall where she was. She was in her fourteenth floor suite in the Hotel Tipton in Los Angeles. Despite a very few brief duties, she had come out here with Miss Flockhart to follow a lead on her sister. Someone knocked at her door.

"Room service."

"Thank you…." Bridget's voice accepted it.

Hearing that voice, Kerry jumped out of her bed and to her feet to look out of the bedroom. In the outer suite, Bridget was wearing a long hotel guest robe as she tipped the steward with a couple of dollars. He had wheeled a cart inside with two plates on it. Bridget wheeled it the rest of the way to the bedroom. Kerry stood stunned. She had found her sister. They were together… finally. Finally! A light feeling came to Kerry's heart, her head sort of trembled and the emotions rushed to her eyes as a million tears. She had found her sister!

"Kerry…" Bridget looked at her. "You've lost so much weight. Haven't you been eating?" She lifted the cover off a plate of lasagna, but Kerry wasn't interested in food. She was going through anger, delight, extreme joy and confusion. Too many things were colliding in her brain. Her eyes were full of tears. She could barely talk. All she could do was reach out and wrap her sister in her arms and hold her.

"Bridget…" Her voice was shaky, her heart full of emotion. "Oh, my God… it's really you!"

"It's really me." Bridget shed a tear as well.

"Was that… Was that…" Kerry struggled to find her thoughts. "What the heck was that?!" She backed away. "Why… Why did you act like that? Do you know what I've gone through to find you? Do you know how long I've been trying to find you? Why did you leave me?!" She stopped being upset to hug her again.

"Okay," Bridget's small grin turned to a large smile. "Which question do you want answered first?" An incredible happiness and joy filled her heart to finally have her sister back in her life.

"Well…" Kerry rolled her eyes. "Let's start with Howard and the guys…."

"Okay…" Bridget placed a slice of French bread on Kerry's plate of spaghetti and handed it to her. "Well, that's pretty basic, you see, I don't want the guys knowing who I am. I mean, if you had shown up by yourself like you were supposed to…"

"Like I was supposed to?" Kerry sat across from Bridget at the table by the window in her bedroom.

"I've had a premonition you were going to find me for the last three months." Bridget confessed. "You were going to find me in Detroit or here in Pasadena, but I never saw you in a premonition showing up with the guys."

"A premonition?" Kerry dabbed sauce on her bread then sipped her drink. "You saw me in a premonition." She grinned just loving this moment. "So, you're finally coming clear about all those…. Oh, what do we want to call them? Abilities?"

"Yes, I've got special abilities…" Bridget rolled her spaghetti in her fork before eating it. "I can fly, I'm bulletproof, I can lift a lot of heavy stuff, I can mentally move objects…" She stopped to smile proudly. "Kerry, I've seen more of the world than you can believe. I've been atop pyramids, the greatest mountains, seen incredible sights, visited so many cultures…"

Kerry sat stat looking at her with a mixture of shock and surprise with a dollop of disbelief. This was not how she pictured this talk. She pictured Bridget being more obtrusive with the truth, not quite so… honest…

"I wish I could have been there with you." Kerry confessed.

"You were." Bridget shined with a slight grin to her sister. Kerry could only glance down and look at the part in the robe Bridget was wearing and saw the big red Kryptonian "S" on her chest. It was not the same costume she had been seen wearing and photographed years ago in Detroit. It was possibly number hundred and thirty seven in a series of several that had been lost by fire, damaged by bullets and even torn off while flying too fast. Kerry looked at it then looked up to her sister's face.

"And all as one of the wealthiest women on the planet. Is that how you made all that money?" She asked. "By premonitions and psychic manipulating of the stock market?"

"Oh, you figured that out too, huh?" Bridget ate some more spaghetti. "Well, almost all of it goes into a special foundation for philanthropic and charitable institutes, but only a very small amount goes into my account for living purposes."

"How much money do you have?"

"You don't want me answering that." Bridget had more spaghetti with her garlic bread.

"How much?"

"You won't be able to handle it."

"How much?!"

"Forty five million, seven-hundred and thirty-four thousand…" She watched as Kerry started choking on a piece of garlic bread after nearly inhaling it in a gasp. Rising to pat her sister on the back, Bridget stopped her choking fit as Kerry dislodged the bread in her throat briefly to correctly swallow it.

"…A hundred and thirty-six dollars and sixty-seven cents…" Bridget answered with a slight pause. "But most of it is stocks, bonds, annuities and companies like Queen Scholarships and the Kent Foundation."

"Queen Scholarships paid for my college tuition!"

"And Rory's…" Bridget confessed nervously. "You're welcome…"

"Oh, my god!" Kerry was learning way too much way too fast. She rose to her feet out of nervous anxiety. "And what's the reasoning behind that?" Kerry pointed to Bridget's costume under the robe and beamed happily to have finally outed her sister. "What? It's easier to rip off an existing character than to create another one? Or do you own DC Comics as well?"

"I own stocks in Marvel, Disney, Microsoft and Time/Warner among others, but Kerry, " Bridget reacted a bit hesitant and embarrassed. "Getting to fly and have premonitions isn't the only thing that happened to me. My mind changed… my brain…" She struggled to explain it. "I'm thinking and rationalizing faster and more cognitively now. Do you recall how self-obsessed I used to be?" She stopped eating and turned from the table. "I started realizing… what I wanted to do. I wanted to make the world a better place. I wanted to help people. I wanted to do the things no else could do, and I realized… I could hide behind a comic book icon. No one ever recalls what I look like because all they do is remember the costume. All people ever see a character… no one ever sees me, and I prefer to keep it that way."

"How?" Kerry rose to stand with Bridget. "How did you even get like this? How did it happen?"

"I was afraid you ask that. That's a lot harder to explain." Bridget stood before the window near the chair with her cape draped over it. "Do you recall your Bible? Psalm Chapter 103, Verse 20…"

Kerry tried to remember.

"Bless the Lord and his Angels who excel in strength who carry His commandments and His voice into the world…" Kerry knew the verse. She thought about it and wondered why Bridget referred to that. She gasped, pretended to look away then looked back to Bridget. "Are you trying to tell me that you're a…"

"They're real." Bridget confessed. "Whether you call them gods or angels, they're real…. Real people who are so pure of heart and incapable of evil that they acquire their full potential to serve Him." She paused. "Most others like me either become doctors, lawyers, police officers, fire-fighters, rescue workers… but a few of us, very few, our drive to do some good makes us more powerful. I decided to become something much bigger, but not because of ego, because I could become a symbol for others. People believe in me. All the good I've done has touched others who have touched others and reached to others…."

Kerry stood stunned. It was way too much to realize and to accept. Her sister was some sort of angel, a potential demigod? A person so pure of heart that it enabled her to have godlike powers?

"I'm not the only one like this." Bridget turned back around. "There's a guy in London who runs around as Batman and a guy who's Spiderman in Tokyo, but they can't fly like I can."

"What about the underwear thing?" Kerry asked the one thing everyone was curious about. Bridget briefly chuckled.

"I did that once to make a point…" Bridget pulled her robe closed up over her costume. "I never expected to do it so often, but… everyone now just expects it."

"Bridget…" Kerry forgot about eating her dinner and realized what she wanted was the truth. "The one thing I want to know more than anything else is why? I could have kept your secret. Why did you run away? Why did you disappear from me?"

"Because history repeats itself." Bridget answered. "Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it. You give people a source of power, and they will abuse it. The one thing I learned from talking with spirits is don't share your secrets. Joan of Arc was burned at the stake for revealing prophecies. Nostradamus was exploited by nobility." She looked embarrassed. "I wanted to tell you so much, but I was warned not to tell. I was warned what could happen if you found out; I was required to make it difficult for you to discover the truth, but I left home because…" She looked lovingly at her sister. "It was time for me to go. It was becoming impossible for me to do this while living at home." She placed her hand to her chest. "This is a full-time job. I have constant visions of the worst things that could happen. I have smaller visions when I pass through the lives of others, and in the cracks, I have to create an identity to live in society. I am always there not because I'm convenient, but because I can't turn off visions of probable events, and what's worse. The future is always changing. A bus crash can no longer occur, but a flood will take its place. I never know when I can take a break."

"Are you coming home with me?" Kerry asked. "I mean… will you lose your powers now that I know?"

"No…" Bridget looked out the window. "I haven't even told you the worst part. Do you recall dad's heart problem?"

"The one you predicted."

"I gave up my life with him that he'd survive." Bridget shed a tear. "He was supposed to die that night so I would leave home."

"No, that can't be true."

"The future changes a lot, but destiny finds a way to lead all paths in one direction." Bridget answered. "The second I go home, we could lose dad…"

"No…." Kerry felt the tears returning.

"Bridget Hennessey no longer exists…" Bridget turned to her sister. "I'm Penny Parker now… That's why you were able to find me. I stopped being Bridget the second I left home."

Kerry postured and paced back and forth a bit. She had learned everything and a bit more. It was all too much to absorb right now. This was the truth. Her sister didn't leave home because she wanted to; she left because she had to! She wasn't the old Bridget. These powers, her pure of heart had made her superior to her both physically and mentally. Bridget had finally become the person Kerry wanted her to be, and she wasn't able to live in her life.

"I miss you so much." Kerry's eyes filled with tears, and sister and sister embraced each other. Bridget delicately held her beloved sister close to her heart.

"You can't tell anyone you found me." The blonde one whispered.

"I can tell mom, right?"

"You can't tell anyone!"

"Why not?" Kerry pushed away from Bridget and looked at her.

"Kerry, there's one more ability I forgot to tell you about." Bridget nervously dropped her head and then lifted it again slowly before her sister. "Do you recall when I saved Kyle's life, and he showed up at the house and confronted me?"

"Yeah…" Kerry looked to her sister. "How did you get him to forget all…" Her eyes made contact with Bridget's big blue eyes, and she felt suddenly light-headed. She tried blinking to shake off the dizziness, but it was no use. She felt tired and sleepy then suddenly stumbled forward into Bridget's arms. Her older sister pulled her close and became remorseful. Her heart was breaking all over again.

"I'm sorry." She whispered. "I hope you understand I'm doing this for you." She held Kerry close to her heart and whispered in her ear. "Everything has been a dream. We never met, and you dreamed you found me." Tears started falling down her face. "I was never here." She started wavering in the difficult memory she was placing in her sister's mind. "I love you, Kerry…" She started bawling over the hard task she had to do. "And I'm so sorry…" Her heart broke and her lips quaked with the hard decision she had to make right now.

"Have a good life, Kerry…" Her heart broke and the emotion exploded from her heart with a million tears pouring from her eyes.


	21. Chapter 21

21

Kerry Hennessey passed through the Detroit Municipal Airport tired and wrought from her trip to the west coast. She felt emotionally wrought, but she wasn't sure why. Elaine Flockhart had tried to cover their hotel bill, but the hotel staff said another party had already covered it. She wondered if the law firm had paid for it, but they said they didn't do it. Not exactly in the mood to question someone else's generosity, she and Kerry flew back home. When she asked Kerry where her research for her sister had gone, her protégé described having met actress Penny Parker and commented on her similarity to her sister, but no, she was not nor had she ever been Bridget Hennessy. It was an odd wrap-up to an adventure Kerry was starting to challenge. Why did she connect this struggling actress she'd never met to Bridget? What was Bridget's connection to Billie Daniels, the daughter of Linda Kent? Something was missing. Her life suddenly felt faked. Something was off. What had happened to her? Picking up her car from the underground garage at her law firm, Kerry drove home trying to piece together the puzzle pieces in her mind. She felt as if she was recalling a dream. What had happened to her in Pasadena? She pulled into her driveway, took her briefcase and overnight bag and re-entered her home.

"I'm home…" Kerry entered through the back door and placed her briefcase down first. Her mother whirled around from washing the dinner dishes, and her father quickly hugged to have her home. Beyond CJ sitting at the counter looking at the newspaper, her grandfather turned from watching television and waited for big news from her.

"Well, well…" Cate was feverishly anxious for good news. "Did you find her?"

"Who?"

"Your sister!" Paul was on the proverbial pins and needles to hear some good news about his lost daughter.

"You didn't find her?" CJ asked inquisitively.

"Don't keep us in suspense…" Her grandfather asked from his chair than stand up. "Was this girl in Pasadena Bridget?"

"Oh, Bridget…" Kerry was uncharacteristically distracted for the first time from finding her sister. "Um, uh, no…" Kerry stood and looked around the room. Everyone was here except Rory, and he was back to college. "I met Penny, and she looked a lot like Bridget, but she wasn't her. Sorry…"

"Sorry?" Cate and Paul exchanged puzzled looks. "But you were so sure."

"No, I wasn't."

"Yes, you were." Paul reminded her then noticed CJ. "Didn't you say you had a date?"

"Oh, she's not going to show up." CJ rationalized.

"What if she did?" Ed loved to mess with his grandson's mind. "Maybe she's waiting for you right now?"

"How much trouble could she get into by standing in front of the bar with a bunch of hookers?" CJ grinned like a young boy and crossed his arms across his chest. He looked to his Grampy, to Paul then back to his grandfather. He looked up and realized how hard it was to get this date with the hot school receptionist.

"Crap…" He realized he couldn't blow this thing and hastened to leave. "If she calls, tell her I had to stop and help a little lady across the street. She loves stuff like that." He grabbed his jacket, fished his car keys from his pocket and opened the front door to step out on the porch. As soon as he closed the door behind him, a thought hit his head, and he felt as if he was conned. Why couldn't he see they were trying to get rid of him? Turning around again, he used the keys already in his hand to unlock the front door he had just come through.

"Wait a minute!" He called out as Paul and Cate turned away suddenly from Kerry. "You're going to talk about the family secret!"

"CJ!" Paul took charge. "Finding Bridget has nothing to do with our old house on Carradine Drive!"

"The old house on Carradine Drive!" CJ had it figured out. That was what the family secret was about! "I knew it! I'm going to figure this out!" He rushed back out of the house. A couple seconds later, they heard his van hurriedly backing out of the driveway. Kerry and Cate looked confused, and Ed was chuckling enough to actually pat Paul on the back.

"Brilliant." Ed chuckled.

"What old house on Carradine Drive?" Cate asked her husband. "There is no Carradine Drive."

"It will be hours before he figures that out…" Paul chuckled at his plot to get rid of CJ to talk about Bridget and turned back to Kerry. "Now, Care Bear…" He looked at his little girl and held her before him to talk straightly with her. "You said you had traced Bridget to Pasadena by a photo on your friend's Facebook page."

"I know…" Kerry responded. "But I was wrong… she wasn't Bridget."

"But you said she was."

"No, I didn't."

"Kerry…" Cate paused and walked around in a small circle before turning back to Kerry. "Look, you called me and said you found your sister, but by time I got your message, you were on the flight home." Why did they seem to be in two different worlds?

"Kerry…" Paul felt as if he was going to need more heart surgery. "Did you find Bridget or not?"

"Okay…." Cate turned around. "What is going on here? You said you found Bridget!"

"I know I did, but when I got there and…"

"Not before! When you called me!"

Kerry paused. She looked at her father then to her grandfather and back to her mother.

"Kerry…" Cate looked for her cell phone in her purse. "You called me from California and said you found your sister. Now, which is it? Did you find her or did you not find her?"

"I called you?"

"Is this your voice?" Cate replayed the message on her cell phone.

The recording played back. "Mom, I found Bridget…" Kerry heard her own emotional voice from her mother's cell phone. "I think… but she did it to me again… She didn't want to talk to me. She practically tossed me out of her apartment and pretended she didn't know me. Please call me."

Kerry looked terrified and confused. She didn't recall making that call. What was going on here? Did she find Bridget? All morning, her life was feeling a bit off. Between the research she had and her encounter with Penny Parker, something felt off. It seemed like a play. She replayed the message on her mother's phone.

"Mom, I found Bridget… I think… but she did it to me again… She didn't want to talk to me. She practically tossed me out of her apartment and pretended she didn't know me. Please call me." Her voice sounded emotional and full of sorrow. Why was she crying? What had happened? She had a fleeting image of her sister before her in that costume. She felt holding her close once more. Her memories weren't all erased.

"Oh-my-God!" Kerry reacted upset. "She hypnotized me! She hypnotized me to forget I found her! I can't believe this!" She paused in disgust turned toward the kitchen then back to her mother. "She did it again!"

"Cate, recall back when I said this keeps getting scary." Paul mugged a bit and sat down near his father-in-law. "Well, it's scary again?"

"She hypnotized you?" Cate was skeptical. "No, not your sister…"

"I believe it…." Ed looked away and back again. "Cate, I was right next to her in that drug store, and I'll tell you… that girl was Bridget. Stone cold… but her presence… It was like when I met Marilyn…"

"You've met Marilyn Monroe?!" Paul was incredulous. He wasn't sure if Ed was exaggerating or telling the truth.

"No, Lipschitz…" Ed antagonized his son-in-law for doubting him. "Of course, Monroe!" He paused. "She had this… godly presence about her when I met her, and when I saw Bridget again… she had it too."

"Kerry…" Cate turned to her daughter. "What makes you think Bridget hypnotized you?"

"Mom, it's the only thing that makes sense." Kerry turned to take a bottle of water from the refrigerator then turned back around. "She couldn't possibly let me come home knowing where she was!" She shook her head and opened her water, but as she looked at it, another memory crept back. "Oh my god, she was also crying…."

"Crying?" Her father looked up wanting to hear more.

"Why was she crying?"

Kerry paused without answering.

"I don't know…" She shook her mother's phone in her presence. "But this is proof! I found her! We know where she is! I may not recall what happened to me, but I found her!"

"Is this Penny Parker on Facebook?" Cate hastened for the family computer by the front door. "I'm so giving her a good talking to..."

"Bridget's on TV…" Her father remarked. Ed's show had ended as anther one took it's place. Paul did a double take and came around first joined by Cate and Kerry who came around to check it out.

"False alarm." Ed looked again. It was a teenage sketch show on Disney Channel starring young comedians influenced by their encounter with the Kryptonian heroine's real life counterpart.

"If Bridget wants to keep her life secret," He turned up the sound on the TV. "I wonder how she's going to feel about this. " On the show, teenage comedienne Tawni Hart was impersonating Bridget as Supergirl with wildly exaggerated hair but her costume had a big question mark instead of the logo of the Kryptonian character Bridget pretended to be. Zora Lancaster and Nico Harris played bandits robbing Grady Mitchell and Chad Dylan Cooper, a replacement to the series now that cast member Sonny Monroe was off on her musical career. Still starring concurrently on "MacKenzie Falls," the teen heartthrob was stretching his acting skills by doing comedy and pretending to be held up on his girlfriend's old sketch series.

"Oh my God, it's Superior Girl…" Chad saw Tawni run into the sketch located in a fake alley. "She'll save us."

"Do your stuff, Superior Girl." Grady announced.

"What's she going to do?" Nico asked.

"She's super-strong, really fast and she beats criminals up; she's like Lindsay Lohan in a department store!"

"Like Amanda Bynes on the highway!"

"Like the cast of Jersey Shore everywhere else…"

"Excuse me guys…" Tawni chewed gun and waved her fingers. "But finger nails haven't dried yet."

"It looks like blondie isn't going to be saving you." Zora waved her fake gun on her co-stars.

"Help us, Superior Girl!" Chad pretended to be in duress. "Help us!"

"Okay, just a minute…" Dressed in her weak superhero costume, Tawni moved as if she was going to throw Nico into the wall then stopped as her cell phone rang. "Oh wait…" She stepped back. "I gotta take this." She answered her phone. "Who is this? Wondrous Woman? On my god, girl… No, I'm not doing anything. What you doing?"

"Thanks for your money and valuables, creeps…" Zora laughed and waved her prop gun around. "Let's go, Muggsy!" She and Nico ran off camera as Grady and Chad sighed upset and let down. They groaned and wandered over to Tawni in the cape and short skirt with the red question mark on her chest. Pretending to have an inaudible conversation, she looked up to Chad and Grady.

"You have got to be the worst superhero in the world!" Grady yelled at her.

"Are you even a real blonde?" Chad shook his finger at her.

Somewhere else in the world, a steel-tipped shoe smashed into a TV screen and shattered it, creating a small explosion and a lot of smoke. In her Pasadena apartment, Bridget waved the smoke awake from her TV with a magazine. She had seen the sketch, and she was not amused.

"I can't believe I saved their lives." She continued fanning, but Leonard and the guys rushed to the rescue. Hearing the explosion, Leonard fretted about her safety and saw a chance to be her knight in shining armor. Howard and Raj were right behind, but Sheldon only casually wandered along out of curiosity. They looked at the shattered picture tube of the TV then back to Bridget trying to look casual as she waved the smoke away from it.

"Oh crap…" Bridget stood and fanned the smoke from her TV's picture tube.

"What happened?" Leonard asked worriedly. Howard unplugged it for her.

"I, uh, accidentally kicked my shoe off into the TV." Bridget claimed nonchalantly. Sheldon smirked nearby as if this incident verified his opinion of Bridget's reputation as Penny being less than intelligent.

"Supergirl…" Sheldon scoffed with a covert chuckle at Howard's beliefs. More than convinced that Penny was not the Girl of Steel in the tabloids, he looked at Howard and smirked derisively then turned and left.

"This must be yours…" Howard produced her partially blacked and scorched boot from the picture tube. "But that TV's shot. I would love to take you out to get a new one."

"That's okay…" Bridget grinned at his effort to charm her. "I'll just take Bernadette."

"I could take you!" Leonard quickly volunteered then realized he sounded too eager. "I mean… I could take you…" He tried to be more casual. Behind Bridget's back, he waved at Howard and Raj to leave the apartment. At first, they didn't get it, but after some gesturing and posturing, they looked at each other and wandered out on their own. It was not much of a disaster, but at least they proved they could stand up to anything that happened.

"You didn't think that was going to work, did you?" Raj spoke of Howard's attempt to bond with the girl they knew as Penny Parker.

"It was a reflex…" Howard mumbled as Leonard tried to get rid of them. Dressed in his khakis and white shirt with a green sweater, Leonard turned round as Bridget placed her shattered TV in the corner by the door. She had a smaller one in her bedroom she carried out and started hooking into her cable line.

"So…" Leonard helped her plug her smaller TV in to her stereo system. "That was a nice time we had with Howard and Bernadette the other night, huh…"

"Yeah, it was…" Bridget looked at him.

"So…" Leonard hedged and hesitated as if he was still a teenager. She smelled incredible. Her perfume wafted through his nose and took over his senses. Her presence exuded like roses and cinnamon wafting on a breeze through the room. It practically had a taste. "What are you doing tonight?"

"I don't know…" Bridget heard a fire engine from twenty-four blocks away, but it was just following an ambulance to a medical emergency. "But something could come up…"

"Why don't we go out and do something?" Leonard asked nervously. Turning around from picking up her apartment, Bridget turned to the short curly-topped physicist. He was finally gaining some confidence. Looking back at Bridget, Leonard stood fearful of her response.

"Leonard, are you asking me for a date?" Bridget asked him to confirm.

"I guess…" He blinked a few times and looked away like a small boy. "You want to go see a movie?"

"It's kind of late…" Bridget checked her clock on the wall.

"How about tomorrow?"

Bridget checked her visions. She had colliding visions of a stoned truck driver driving through the front of a store, a small aircraft stalling in Canada, a rainstorm flooding Pawkett, Ontario, and kids playing with matches in a Minnesota school. She wasn't sure which one of any of them was going to occur, but she couldn't risk it.

"That's not good for me."

"How about Monday?"

One Amber Alert, three police chases, a landslide, five boys in an unstable abandoned home and an angry ex-postal employee occurred in visions.

"Actually worse." Bridget remarked.

"Tuesday. How's Tuesday?"

More incidents occurred in Toronto, London, Sydney, Fall River in Texas, Snow Valley in Vermont and Quitique, Oklahoma.

Bridget embarrassingly shook her head.

"Wednesday?"

Bridget rolled her eyes to the side and searched her head for images. Either it was too far ahead or nothing major was happening, but she smirked, grinned and looked back to Leonard.

"Looks like we have a date on Wednesday." She lit up but not as much as Leonard. "It will also give me a chance to get a nice dress."

"Perfect!" Leonard cheered like a small boy on Christmas. "How about Risotto's. I'll get us a reservation."

"I'll be looking forward to it." Bridget kissed him to the cheek. She heard another boyish burst of glee from him, and he turned away to head out, briefly smacking into the wall and fumbling with the door as he headed out of her apartment.

"See you there…"

"I'll be there." Bridget responded. Picking up her magazines off the floor to recycle, she heard her door click shut and then an overly joyful jumping and cheering in the hall. Someone was really happy to have been accepted by her. She smiled and turned to face her kitchen counter as more sirens echoed from beyond the building. Distant voices echoed from afar…

"People trapped in the basement… source of fire unknown… could be arson…"

"Could be a long night…" Bridget pulled her sweater over her head to her blue, red and yellow and got ready to go to work.


	22. Chapter 22

22

When actress Reese Witherspoon appeared on his show to promote her new movie with Hugh Jackman and Seth Rogen, Conan O'Brien surprised her by flashing her with a newspaper from Dallas, Texas where a blonde girl in a "Supergirl" costume described as looking like her had ripped apart the trash compactor at a grammar school to rescue an eleven-year old girl coerced into it by her cruel older classmates. Although she had finally answered the question publicly, not all Supergirl fans were convinced, but it was kind of obvious that this sensation and phenomenon was quite popular in Hollywood. Big stars and celebrities from Nicolas Cage to Rhianna and Shaquille O'Neal all believed the girl in the cape and costume was real. Carrie Underwood and Jessica Alba were other celebs sometimes asked the same question as Reese if the superhuman DC Comics impersonator was actually themselves. Katy Perry had asked out loud in a televised interview if Supergirl would prove she existed by appearing at one of concerts, and Justin Bieber had a look-alike appear for him at one of his concerts and carry him off his feet in wires. On "Celebrity Prankers," Kelly Clarkson had even deceived Sonny Munroe and Justin Guarini on a hidden camera show by pretending to accidentally expose her secret identity as Supergirl on a fake talk show. The Jonas Brothers offered Supergirl publicly a million dollars to prove her existence to them by giving them the name of her real identity. Ashley Tisdale was in the middle of making a film on the phenomenon, and Tandamount Studios was even calling the movie as based on a real story. James Franco had fallen in love with the unknown superhuman female after she saved his life in the shooting of his last movie. His parachute over Southern California had failed to open and as he was plummeting to Earth, two arms reached around him, held him close and carried him down to within ten feet of his film crew. Catching his breath, he just looked back to thank her and discovered she was gone. The following week, Franco was trying to buy Howard's website for twenty-five thousand dollars, but after some deep consideration and soul-searching, Howard turned it down, but he still got donations from Franco, Bieber and Zack Braff to keep it going and making it the largest Supergirl website on the Internet.

"Howard Wolowitz here…." Howard Wolowitz was taping his video blog for his _Incredible Supergirl Sightings Database_. "And this is the May 18, 2012 video conference blog for the Supergirl Sightings Database. As you know, she has been especially busy the last few weeks catching criminals, saving people and delivering food and presents to all those sick and starving children in Africa." He paused. "I swear… she must have more air traffic miles than Santa." He picked up a list of newspaper reports printed from a variety of on-line news websites. "Anyway, our first new sighting this week comes from a snow mobile accident on Blue Bottom Lake near Sky Mountain Ski Resort in Anchorage, Alaska where a guy not only got rescued by our Kryptonian crush, but also got to fly with her… Some guys just all the luck!"

At the hundred-and-fifty-room mountain lodge, Troy Bolton and his fiancée, Gabriella Montez, were giving an unofficial high school reunion where they had first met. It was almost a year since their plane had been re-routed and placed down in the middle of a Taylor Swift concert in Los Angeles. It was an overcast day with warnings of snow, but almost all their friends were here to celebrate their reunion. Sharpay hadn't made it, but her brother, Ryan, had and was enjoying the karaoke with Kelsey, while Taylor was enjoying time with a potential beau in the Fireplace Lounge. Walking the snowy wintry grounds back to their cabin hand in hand, Troy was rejoined by his best friend, Chad Danforth roaring toward them on a snow mobile.

"Dude…" Chad grinded to a stop across their path to their cabin. "You have got to join us on the trails."

"Sorry…" Troy looked to him then to his future wife. "But the rest of my night is with Gabrielle."

"Are you sure?"

"He's sure." Gabrielle answered for Troy.

"Okay…" Chad roared his engine. "But I'm cutting across the lake for the campgrounds. Some guy said he saw Sasquatch."

"I wouldn't be doing that." Troy tried to warn his buddy. "That lake doesn't exactly freeze evenly."

"Troy, come on…" Chad chuckled at him. "We've been skimming across it all day. It's solid."

"The lodge wouldn't be posting signs if it…." Troy started talking as Chad squeezed his gas pedal under his foot and roared across the path and straight for the lake. There were dozens of snow mobile tracks across it both lengthwise and horizontally. It did look solid as Chad sent a spray of snow behind him then veered around and through an unblemished area to wave back at them. Chad and Gabrielle looked at each other briefly, and realized he had proven them wrong. From the distance, the former East High basketball star trussed up in the blue winter outfit waved toward them and tried cutting over his path once more. He thought he'd heard a dull creaking from the ice, but he'd just keep going before it cracked all the way. The rest of the pack was waiting on him on the far side. Pressing the gas again, he started to storm forward and felt his snow mobile suddenly lurch forward and shoot straight up with a sudden cold swallowing him up over his back with complete darkness. He had just briefly looked away, and Troy watched Chad out of his peripheral vision vanish into the ice under him. His eyes and voice screamed out with sheer stark terror.

"Chad!" Troy's voice echoed the darkness. The other snow mobile riders started speeding to the rescue toward the hole, and as Gabrielle watched, Troy was joined in the freezing cold temperature on the ice by three more guests trying to help, but a violet shadow came down out of no where.

"Stop!" Bridget descended and slid a few feet on the frozen lake. "Don't come out here!" She did not want to be plucking several people out of this ice-cold Alaskan fishing pond. Gabrielle recognized her from Los Angeles. It was her! Zack even froze in her presence to see her again, but instead of diving into the hole and rescuing Chad, the blonde maiden of steel looked to be searching the area ten feet around it. The other snow mobile riders stopped where they were, two took pictures on the cell phones as Bridget found Chad under the ice looking for his opening and freezing to death. Dropping down, she reared her arm and shattered the ice over him and got dumped into the lake as well. Watching for what seemed like seconds, they watched the water explode and the two of them shooting straight up into the dark bluish gray sky.

"Where's she taking him?" Troy's voice erupted into the air as mist as he watched the two of them vanish into the sky.

Coughing up the ice-cold water, Chad shivered and shook as a warming sensation built up in his head and shoulders and slowly worked down through his body. He felt numb, his body barely felt it existed, but as he looked up, he saw Bridget's bosom close to his face. Her left arm was keeping him close to her, but his arms and legs hung like dead weight under him. Her right arm extended southward, Bridget held him close as he struggled to stop trembling and shaking. Only the far ocean horizon on his right side stayed almost constant, but as she raced southward to warm him in the Pacific coastal winds blowing north, the scenery under him sped by under him at top speed. It looked like an artist's mat struggling and distorting and mixing through half a dozens distant colors warping in and out between distant mountains, flatlands, cities and river rushing by him.. Gradually, Chad could move his fingers again. The air friction was warming him up, and as Bridget slowed, he could start seeing cliffs and beaches whirring by at two hundred miles an hour. When she finally slowed to a stop, she had her arms wrapped around him, and the two of them were hovering over San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge near Angel Island.

"Are you warm yet?" Her blue eyes looked into his big brown eyes.

"Oh, yeah…" Chad gasped to be held up and pressed against her with her arms up under his arms and around his back.

"I think we better let your friends know you're okay…" Bridget responded back.

"I think we could take our time heading back." He responded then quickly groaned as Bridget held on to him around his waist and started heading back north.

"In Seattle," Howard was pulling links to websites. "We have an unconfirmed report near the old Mayflower Department Store. I say old because… it's not there anymore. Where it once was is now one giant pile of rubble…"

"Hardison…" Former insurance inspector Nathan Ford led his team quickly into the service elevator. The store was abandoned and bankrupt. It's owner, Franklin Palminteri, while pretending to be a mob boss had emptied the employee insurance policies to pay off his home off on Orcas Island and used legal means to bilk employees out of their missing unemployment insurance. With Alec Hardison manipulating the store's security and computer systems by computer off site, Ford had hoped to scam Palminteri by convincing him he had real mob ties, but Palminteri had double-crossed him by turning them over to the FBI.

"Hardison…" Tapping his ear bud, Nate looked to Sophie and Eliot as Parker got the elevator going for the basement parking area. "Hardison, what happened? How could he have busted our identities?"

"He didn't!" Alec Hardison was at his computer down the street in his van and pulling up the security cameras. "The FBI don't have files on your aliases… Uh-oh…" One camera went out with a flash. "Nate, get out! He's blowing the building!"

Listening to the rumble over their heads, Nathan hit the open button to the elevator on the bottom level of the store's parking area. From the second, fourth and sixth floors, explosives decimated whole rooms, decapitated abandoned mannequins and slammed floors and ceiling down to one direction closer to the ground. A million tons of department store was cracking and coming down on them. Rushing to their vehicle in the middle, they watched as one column was crushed into dust on the far end followed by successive columns crumbling toward the center and coming toward them. All Hardison could do was watch with his mouth hanging open in shock as one security camera after another went out in the collapsing building. Eliot stopped in stunned surprise as their vehicle was suddenly crushed. Nathan gasped and turned to get his team down through the bottom of the elevator shaft, but that was caving in as well. It sounded like a violent thunderstorm crashing down on them as they realized the world was almost literally crashing down in them. Sophie screamed to see the parking garage around them vanishing in less than a minute. Pulled close, Parker felt Eliot push him down close to Sophie and Nate and try to shield their bodies, but the eruptions of sound and thundering suddenly stopped their cacophony of noise. As the noise abated, the grifter, mastermind, hitter and thief opened their terrified eyes and looked up to the shadowy space over their heads.

They thought they were hearing the soundtrack to a very familiar 1978 Christopher Reeve movie to see a blonde holding the ceiling up over their heads from caving in on them. Her back was to them so they couldn't see her face, but she was wearing a red cape with a yellow "Superman" emblem on it, and she was holding the last support beam in place and hundreds of tons of concrete, steel and building materials beyond that. Her hands shaking and her teeth clenched tight together, Bridget groaned a bit and looked toward Nate and his team.

"There's an open storm drain twenty feet to your left!" She screamed to them. "I'll hold it off as long as I can."

"You heard her!" Ford was eager to save Sophie, Parker and Eliot to finish his scam with Palminteri and get him to justice. A brief look back, and Sophie gasped long enough to take a second look. Hearing the structure creaking and groaning along its seams, looking around the few lights flickering to stay on, Eliot checked Bridget out once more with a dirty grin and went to join Nate and the others. Unlike the others, he had seen the websites, and he actually believed she had existed. Now the others would know it too. Realizing she was close to pushing herself to her maximum, Bridget sensed Ford's team out of danger and quickly let go to dive out of the way and strike the floor for her own exit. As things went black, she found herself deep underground under the rubble and a few minutes later flying up and out of a storm tunnel under the highway back up into open blue skies. Down the street, Hardison exhaled with relief to see his colleagues coming out from a manhole in the street.

"In San Francisco," Howard continued his blog. "Home of the Golden Gate Bridge, Alcatraz and the Myth-Busters, Supergirl apparently rescued a whole school bus of kids from becoming fish food in the bay…" He checked his notes. "And no, no one got any photos." He described Bridget's visit to the Halliwell Sisters, four white witches who had helped her develop and expand her powers back when she was Billie Daniels, a so-called cousin of the sisters. During her time with them, Bridget not only saved Prue's life from a malicious presence in the area but also had a vision of their long lost sister, Paige, who became the fourth sister. She loved all of them, but she had particularly bonded with Phoebe.

"So, how's Pasadena?" Phoebe asked her. They strolled back to the house through the neighborhood after getting lunch.

"Great…"

"How's Leonard?" Phoebe knew Bridget liked him.

"Why are you asking about him?" Bridget stopped at the street corner as she headed to the family residence. A bus stopped several feet away from them to let off several kids then continue past them.

"Because I know you like him…" Phoebe liked playing matchmaker. "Have you told him you're a demigod yet?"

"No, and I'm not a demigod…" Bridget sipped her ice drink. "I just have… Okay, I'm demigod adjacent." She watched as Phoebe paused, sniffed something at the curb and swayed a bit on her feet. "But we're not even dating seriously. We're friends."

"Oh please…" Phoebe looked at her. "I see the light go on in your eyes when you talk about him." She looked at Penny then reacted quite ashen. "That bus is dripping brake fluid." Phoebe looked away into the direction it had departed. "Did you have the same vision that I…" She looked back at Bridget and realized she was gone. The only thing near her was Bridget's guava-flavored ice drink splayed in the grass by the road.

"I guess she did have that vision."

Down the road, bus driver Todd Harlecki pumped his brake as he started going down one of San Francisco's famous hills and felt the pedal hit the floor. He was a bit worried with all the Webster High kids on his bus and tried shifting gears, but the gears wouldn't jump and he was looking straight at one of the steepest residential hills looking down on Fisherman's Wharf on the bay. Struggling to handle it without scaring the kids on board, he felt the bus start speeding as gravity took over its plummet. Streaking alongside them, student Fletcher Quimby responded quickly as a red blur flew alongside side.

"It's her!" He grinned excitedly.

"It can't be." Olive Doyle had often rationalized that Supergirl wasn't real. "She doesn't exist!"

"What is she doing?" Chyna Fletcher looked over the front of the bus.

"Hold on to your seats!" Todd screamed at the kids. "The brakes finally died out!" He cursed the school cutbacks, and Bridget held on to the front of the bus and slowly started slowing it down than all at once. If she stopped it too quickly, she'd have kids flying out the windshield and around the interior. Her left knee on the front bumper, she ground her right foot into the pavement once, lifted it and ground it again. She had to slow it down to under forty before she stopped it all at once or else kids would be flying out the windows. Through the stop signs, cars swerved to miss the bus speeding down the road like a huge armored dinosaur charging for the bay. College student Michelle Tanner swerved her car out of the way, and then Eddie Thomas on his way to visit close friends stopped his car to the racing bus. On the bus itself, the kids were both scared and excited. They were going to be on the news if they survived. Todd just kept pounding the brakes and trying to get the transmission to change gears. Bridget grinded her foot once more and looked back to make sure nothing was in the way of the careening school bus. In front of her, she noticed a distracted UPS driver turning at the corner right in front of her. Still going too fast to stop and avoid a collision, Bridget gripped the front bumper and body of the spiraling bus tighter, grinded her foot once more and jumped off on it, carrying the twenty ton bus over the top of the van to clear it and looked around under herself searching for a clear level spot to put it back down. On the bus, seventeen kids cheered and began laughing and partying as they started rehearsing their speeches for the evening news. In the driver's seat, Todd looked around the structures under him and noticed he was coming back down in another neighborhood.

Strolling out of a side street coffee shop, two Discovery Channel personalities heard cars squealing to a stop and looked over to the bus coming vertically down before them on the street. Lowering his cup of cappuccino, one of them took a look, glanced back to his co-star and looked back as the descending bus came down and groaned its metal joints to be resting on the ground once more. The beautiful blonde in the red cape seemingly riding its front end stepped off and waved to the kids crowding the bus windows to see her in person before she tilted her head back, levitated and streaked skyward once more.

"I thought we busted her." Grant asked Torry.

"There's no way we're getting Kari to wear that costume."

"In Waiamae Bay near Honolulu, " Howard read his next newspaper account. "The Honolulu Police are searching for evidence in the disappearance of a fishing trawler lost in a storm there. Was it bad luck, an insurance scam or just a bad day to be in Honolulu? Well, if our Babe of Steel is there, it's our lucky day…"

In the clear waters off Hawaii, Detective Steve McGarrett was exploiting the skills he had acquired as a former Navy Seal to search the bay in evidence related to a case. Since the body of Marcus Hollister, a deceased security guard, had been found floating in the bay, it had been suggested that the amateur diver had been collecting and selling silver bars from a war ship list in the bay back in the Sixties. Unfortunately, if Hollister had been killed at the wreck, which meant the crime scene would be underwater and that McGarrett and detective Chin Ho Kelly would have to scrutinize the area themselves. The underwater work took him into the underwater weightless scene of the coral-encrusted rusted wreck of the USS Decatur, a former destroyer from World War Two. When it was originally sunk in 1967 as an artificial reef, there should have been nothing of worth on it. The question was who planted the silver bars in the old ship, were those bars the same ones stolen from the Cook County Bank in Las Vegas that same year and how did Hollister learn about the lost bars?

"Find anything yet?" Kelly radioed to McGarrett over a device in his mouthpiece.

"Not yet…" McGarrett started swimming past the hold and caught a glimpse of something shining in it. "Wait a second… this damage to the hold cover looks recent…" He looked inside and hesitantly descended into it. "I think I found something."

"I better go with you." Kelly followed after him. "This old wreck is unpredictable."

"How are you on air?"

"I got fifteen minutes." Kelly gestured to two other forensic divers to follow him to the bow of the ship to assist his colleague.

"I got something." McGarrett picked up the lost glass face from off a diver's watch. "I think we have our crime scene." He stood to brace himself on a length of bar knocked loose from the hold and watched it shift. When it shifted, a rip exploded in the side of the rusted ship and a torrent of water gushed in muddling his visibility in the water. As the wreck settled, he tried to gather his bearings and swerved to watch another beam coming straight toward him and pinning him down against his tank.

"Steve?"

"Ship settled around me…" The detective clutched the evidence tightly. "I'm tasting saltwater. I think my tank has been compromised. I'm pinned under wreckage."

"We're on our way…"

As his vision cleared, McGarrett thought the pressure was getting to his brain because he saw a glimpse of a figure with long glowing blonde hair come down on top of him and then two hands lifting the two ton beam up off of him. He was almost a hundred feet under water and this girl had no gear at all. Not sure if he should start believing in mermaids, he looked to the huge red "S" on the chest of her blue form-fitting outfit, she hoisted the large rusted chunk of hull off him and lifted him to her his feet. Extending her arm out to empty water, an object jumped from the darkness and vaulted into her empty hand. It was a modern scuba tank. Turning it around, Bridget showed him the manufacturing sticker on it. It was from Edbrook Diving Supplies, owned by Jerry Hester, a local malcontent. With Ho getting closer, Bridget turned and dived toward the hole in the side of the ship, just barely missing Ho and the other detectives.

"What – what was that?" Ho looked and looked again. "Was that a mermaid?"

"If she is, she's on our side."

"And the day after that, Supergirl was sighted in New York City over Times Square." Howard was still recording. "And over twenty-three people got photos. Of course, only two of them are any good…"

In New York City, Bridget had stopped a criminal sniper from taking out Police Chief Frank Reagan and dumped the gunman at the feet of Frank's son, Danny Reagan, a police detective, before taking to air again. Zipping over Manhattan looking for somewhere to have lunch was always something of a spectacle. New Yorkers and Manhattanites always took notice of her and got excited. Heiress Blair Warner was driving south on Fifth Street to suddenly see Bridget speed over her Mercedes, and all the office workers on the fifth floor of the Goliath National Bank rushed to the windows to see her. Nanny Jesse Prescott rushed to save Luke Ross, one of her young charges, from jumping off his balcony in trying to get Bridget's photo. College student Brad O'Keefe heard she was coming toward Times Square from Seventh and rushed to get her photo for his collection, and lawyer Marshall Eriksen cheered to see her come close to him in a crosswalk that he could see her blue eyes. The adolescent girls in Laura Petrie's Dance School briefly ignored their lessons to get a three second glance of Bridget flying past their windows. On the bus, Chandler Bing and Tony Micelli had to twist themselves around in their seats to see Bridget come down low enough to spot check a Chinese restaurant while Elaine Benes spilled coffee on herself in her coffee place as people charged the windows to seen the Girl of Steel buzz through their city. It was kind of obvious that this city loved her more than Detroit or Los Angeles. Bridget thought it was because there were more skyscrapers and tall buildings for witnesses to see her, but all these witnesses also made it harder for her to sneak down to hide her identity. Pretending to vault into the sky once more, Bridget started to soar upward then did a ninety-degree turn at the adjacent alley near her. Once her feet reached terra firma, she pulled her blue jeans from her pack and jumped into them. Closing them up, she tossed her pack up, pulled her sweater down over her head to her waist, tossed her hair and recaught her pack. Over her head, a seven-year-old boy watched her secret dance from his apartment window, but she must have heard his giggle because Bridget looked up to him and placed her finger to her lips to keep her secret. Giggling again, he jumped back into his apartment, and Bridget stepped out from the alley and turned out on to the sidewalk down from Times Square to dust off her sweater and blue jeans. Her calfskin boots covered up her red stocking shoes while her pack with her cape and other things was slung over her shoulder as she checked her watch then debated where to get lunch before making her regular jump back west to Pasadena. The last time she grabbed lunch here was at the Waverly Sub Sandwich Shop on Waverly Place near Greenwich Village, and she was scared to death that Justin Russo recognized her from the photos on Howard's website. However, she had made other friends here back when she lived here as Linda Kent. Two of them were Tabitha and Amanda Stephens, Samantha's daughters, and Lindsay Munroe from the local crime lab. The young forensic specialist had met her as Linda during a police charity fundraiser the year after she had left Detroit. Wondering if she could still muster that British accent, Bridget looked at the contacts in her cell phone and walked past a sidewalk restaurant with a low hedge line separating their exterior dining area from the patrons. Busy dodging pedestrians, businessmen and a mother with her two boys, Bridget wasn't even looking when one of the restaurant patrons looked at her briefly, looked again and jumped up from lunch with her sister.

"Penny!" Priya Koothrapalli was Raj's sister. Much like Kerry in Detroit, she was a law student studying in New York City, but at the minute, she was dining with her older sister, Ratri, a struggling actress and infrequent model. A few feet from her, Penny recognized her voice and froze. How was she going to explain being in Manhattan?

"Penny?"

"Excuse me…" Bridget looked around and pretended to be confused as she looked up Lindsay's cell phone number on her own mobile device. "Are you talking to me?"

"Well, of course I am…" Priya chuckled and looked briefly back to her big sister. "Ratri, this is Penny, one of Rajesh's friends. Penny, this is my sister, Ratri."

"Hello…" Priya's sister grinned back

"Penny, what you doing in New York City?" Ratri looked back at her.

"I'm sorry…" Penny tried to continue her deception. "I think you have me confused with someone else. My name's Billie… Billie Daniels."

"Of course, it is…" Priya humored her, but Bridget stuck to her former identity, shook her head and continued on her way to play the role she was trying to create. She hated lying to Raj's sister, but how could she explain being in Manhattan? If she didn't lie to Raj's sister, how would she explain to Raj and the guys being in Manhattan when they had all seen her leave for work at the Cheesecake Factory just this morning. Behind her, Priya reacted offended to being snubbed, looked at her sister then back to Bridget vanishing into the crowd.

"Priya," Ratri sipped her tea and looked to her baby sister. "I don't think that that was Raj's friend."

"Don't be ridiculous…" Priya was hurt and offended. "I know Penny; we're friends. She was wearing the earrings I gave her." She slid her sister's laptop closer to her on the table past her Eggplant Parmesan and opened it up. "Billie Daniels… " She mumbled as she checked to confirm or deny such a person existed. Her sister looked back to her curiously shaking her head. Priya was always challenging things. It was the same way she was when her brother Raj told her than Americans didn't wear underwear or when her cousin Sanjay announced he was becoming Baptist because the religion celebrated Christmas twice a year. Running a search of the name, Priya caught a photo from Doherty High School in San Francisco. She glanced at the photo as her jaw dropped. Looking back the way Bridget had departed, she started wondering if she really did meet Penny's look-a-like. Ratri read the newspaper photo caption.

"Billie Daniels, the daughter of British philanthropist Linda Kent, graduates Valedictorian with a perfect 4.0 GPA from Doherty High School in the Nob Hill section of San Francisco." She paused to look at her sister. "She plans on attending UCLA with majors in business and economics with a minor in acting. Pictured with her left to right are Piper Halliwell, Prue Halliwell, Sabrina Spellman and Phoebe Halliwell."

"Oh my…" Priya was stunned.

"I don't think that was your friend, Penny." Ratri announced and continued eating her lunch.

"I gotta send this picture to Rajesh…" Priya's feelings at being snubbed by her brother's friend was turning to stunned disbelief to find another girl who looked like Penny. "He's never going to believe it."

"Oh, " Ratri paused to swallow what was in her mouth. "Ask him how things are doing with his boyfriend, that Howard boy."

"Rajesh isn't gay." Priya was simultaneously calling Rajesh in Pasadena.

"Sure he is…" Ratri loved to give her little brother a hard time for being sensitive around girls. Back in Pasadena at Cal Tech, Rajesh Koothrapalli was one of four in the institute's astrophysics lab charting the drift of stars in outer space using the large NASA telescope from Hawaii. Sitting at his computer, he looked up to his associates, Todd Healey and Craig Nelson, in the lab. They were nice guys, but they had nothing in common. The fourth person was Jeannie Whitecloud, an attractive Native American who had transferred from the astrophysics lab at the Bellows Institute in Sacramento. Raj couldn't talk to her directly, but then Todd was so take charge in the lab that it didn't matter. Hearing his phone chirp, Raj looked at the caller ID, rolled his eyes in exasperation to be dealing with his sister again and accepted her call.

"What do you want?"

"Raj, you have got to look at the picture I sent you." Priya responded.

"I'm busy… Can I do it later?"

"Hello, Raj…" Ratri took her sister's phone. "How's my gay little brother?"

"I'm not gay!" Raj heard Todd and Craig break up laughing. "Stop telling people that!"

"Raj…" Priya took her phone back as her sister had her laugh. "I just met a girl who looks just like Penny. You will never believe it. I sent you a picture."

"How much like Penny?" Raj realized that if Leonard could get Penny to date him, he might have a shot with her look-alike. He rolled to another computer terminal and accessed the Internet to open his e-mail account. Spotting the e-mail from his sister, he opened it and the image of Billy Daniels and Sabrina Spellman with the Halliwell sisters. Sabrina looked a bit like Penny's sister, Sabrina. His eyes rounded and a little grin spread from his mouth to his face.

"They could be twins, right?" Priya announced to her brother.

"Billie Daniels is the daughter of Linda Kent?" Raj recognized the name. "Mrs. Kent owns Leonard and Sheldon's building and the Cheesecake Factory where Penny works. She's even donated money to my lab… and Leonard's!"

"Well, that certainly can't be a coincidence!" Priya exclaimed and started wondering if she had been right all along…

"Three days later, " Howard continued his video blog. "We have a sighting from Trenton involving the US Marshalls and an escaped convict named Harvey Dwayne Cooper from Tatum Federal Prison in New Hampshire… Now, research tells us that Cooper is a psychopath with absolutely no respect for human lives…" He paused. "Kind of like another person I know named Cooper…"

The case involved US Marshall agents Ray Zancanelli and Charlie DuChamp and their team of prison inmates to capture prison inmates. Among them, Shea Daniels was the street-smart thug chasing Cooper down the alley next to the empty Blanchard Warehouse where Erica Reed, a trained bounty hunter saw him and picked up the chase to take down Cooper. Dr. Lloyd Lowery was a psychology and mental prodigy who had deduced Cooper was looking for something stashed years ago in the warehouse. Together the team had a nearly perfect ninety-eight percent success rate in capturing fleeing escaped convicts, and they weren't letting Cooper get away. The chase covered halls, five flights of stairs and three busted doors. Unable to escape Daniels or Reed, Cooper charged the stairs for the roof and was impeded by the lack to a ladder to take him down to the ground. All of Trenton, New Jersey was laid out before him if he could reach it.

"Cooper!" Zancanelli and DuChamp had him trapped and guns drawn. "It's over! Put up your hands and assume the position."

Forty-three years old, Harvey Dwayne Cooper, drug pusher, bank robber, murderer and anti-government terrorist, found himself unarmed and without choices. Snarling as he tossed his empty gun away, he turned around to face the Marshalls and their criminal allies. He was grinning and shaking his head.

"Assume the position!"

"Yeah…" Cooper snorted and put his hands over his head. "But how you going to deal with this?" He stepped up and backward off the ledge and dropped into space to spite their authority. Trying to accept what they were seeing, DuChamp and Zancanelli charged the ledge trying to grab him. Erica gasped behind them as they tried to catch their perp and drag him back, but they just looked over the roof and backed up in disbelief. Coming up to meet them was a blonde girl in a blue leotard and red skirt and cape with bright red boots. Carrying Cooper by the back of his underwear, she was coming up over their heads with their prisoner. Erica gasped in shock with her mouth hanging open. Ray and Charlie looked confusingly at each other a second with their guns drawn as Lloyd jumped up laughing.

"I knew she was real! I knew it! I knew it!" He was jumping and cheering and applauding her appearance.

"Do you guys drop something?" Bridget let go of Cooper to fall and smash into the roof under their feet. Raising her head upward, she suddenly shot upward with her right arm extended before her sure in the knowledge that DuChamp and Zancanelli had it from here. Lloyd watched as she rose another hundred feet then leveled out and cleaved westward across the sky, leaving a fine blue line through the clouds over his head.

"Now, we don't get a lot of sightings from Colorado…" Howard continued on his blog as he sipped his Pepsi. "But a recent Denver story knocks Colorado up to twenty-two with this street sighting of an electrician who had to be rescued on the job. I know one thing, you'd never get me doing a job like that…"

In Denver, Colorado, Kyle Anderson, an employee of the Outdoor Man sports outlet, was busy running around and doing errands for his employer. He ran to the post office for him, dropped off his laundry and was expected to pick up the man's lunch and get back to the shop in time to do his regular store duties. It meant a lot of running around, but he was glad to do it. It established was a valued and trusted employee in his boss's eye and could lead to a decent position in the business, but then, everyone in a while, he just wanted to really tell Mr. Alzate off and tell him where to go, but he didn't. It just wanted in his nature. Picking up his boss's pastrami sandwich from the deli and a meatball sub for himself, Kyle stepped back out into the blustery cold mountain weather and checked the street to hurry out to his truck parked off the square near city hall. He only got so far when he heard the sound of scraping metal over his head, and a chunk of metal detritus came plummeting to Earth, ripping through the outside canopy of the deli he had just departed and hitting the sidewalk just three feet from where he had been standing. Hurrying across the street, he looked up and over the row of brownstone building fronts to see what several others were ogling and pointing at overhead. Hanging over a hundred feet over the air for the third floor electrical tower was a city power employee hanging and flailing by his safety cable and harness keeping him from falling. The platform he had been on had given way, and now he was dangling five feet away from the tower over a fatal fall.

"Holy crap!" Kyle raced to his truck, tossed in the sandwiches and grabbed his video recorder to tape this once in a lifetime footage. Originally, he was going to get rich by selling footage of Sasquatch to those "Finding Bigfoot" people, but he also recognized a potential news moment when it happened. Distracted by-standers and concerned locals with him watched as the man screamed and called for help. Seven people with cell phones called 911, and five guys stormed by the deli and the bookstore next door for roof access to save the dangling figure from death. Watching and recording, Kyle lowered his camera to catch a police car on patrol stop in the street. One officer radioed for help, his partner started sending people out of the way to cordon off the street for rescue workers to make the scene.

"Look up there!"

Kyle lifted his camera upward just as the man's harness snapped and a plummeting figure in red caught him three feet later and carried him across the street to touch down on Earth. Kyle was jumping up and down cheering. It was her! This footage was a hundred times more valuable than some shaggy ape creature out in the woods beyond town. He had footage of Supergirl! He'd been waiting for this moment his entire life, and he finally had it. He caught local footage that she existed!

"Okay, Max, just keep breathing…" Bridget placed Max Hirsch down on the sidewalk bench to catch his breath. Out came a dozen cell phones to catch her photo. The officer stopped and looked again in stunned surprise.

"Thank you… thank you…." Max clutched his pounding heart grateful to be alive. Kyle was racing closer through the parking lot to get to Bridget with his camera, but Bridget turned away from him not letting him see her face, raise her hand upward and ascended up in the sky again, lifting slowly and quicker until she caught the breeze and was aloft once more.

"Supergirl!" Kyle raced around other amateur teenage photographers and people racing to check on Max. "Supergirl…. Wait!" With a fire truck and ambulance racing to the scene, Kyle groaned to lose her so quickly then checked his footage. "Please tell me I got her face… please tell me I got…" He had caught her landing with Max, placing him on the bench and then a waft of her golden blonde hair blocking out her face as she lifted off into the sky. "No!" He didn't get her face, but he did get within ten feet of her and the shape of her figure in her costume. Cursing his bad luck, he turned angrily on his left foot and returned to his truck.

"Hey, Kyle!" Mandy Baxter came running from the one-way street next to city hall to meet him. She was the vivacious middle daughter of Mike Baxter, his boss, and a store manager for Mr. Alzate. Beautiful and seemingly always lit up with an exuberant smile and big sparkling brown eyes, she raced to catch up with him. "Wow, funny finding you here…"

"Yeah…" Kyle defeatedly grimaced on his poor luck. "Well, I'm almost always here getting lunch for Mr. Alzate… What are you doing here?"

"Oh, I was just… shopping…" Amanda lied. She'd been kicked out of the movie theater for using a fake ID. "Hey, can I ride with you to Outdoor Man? I can catch a ride from there with my dad."

"Yeah, sure…" Kyle forced a grin, slid into his truck and unlocked the door for Mandy to get in, but as she slid in, he started wondering. Why was he meeting her here now? He got sandwiches here for his boss all the time, but he never saw Mandy in this part of town near City Hall. Was this just a coincidence? Clicking on her seatbelt, Kyle rechecked his footage and looked to Mandy in her blue jeans and sweater. Could she be wearing a costume under that?

"Kyle…" Mandy realized he was looking at footage in his camera instead of driving.

"Mandy…" He looked up to her stunned and excited. "Oh my God… it's not a coincidence I'm running into you here… Is it? You're Supergirl!"

"What?!" The teenage beauty reacted surprised. Where was he getting this? She knew he was sometimes a bit slow on the intake, but he had never accused her of being a costumed crime-fighter.

"You are, aren't you?" Kyle insisted. "Oh my God… Why didn't I ever see it?!" He was grinning and clutching his chest as his heart pounded harder and harder. Mandy didn't know what to say. If she denied it, he'd never believe her, but if she confirmed it… What could it hurt? He'd worship her and the ground she walked on, and what girl could give up that kind of adulation? And why not? He was cute, and he liked her. She looked out the car window to the girl parked by her and uncontrollably grinned.

"You can't tell my dad!" She grabbed him by his jacket. "If he finds out what I can do, he'd lose it!"

"No, no, no, no, no, no…." Kyle grinned. "I'll never tell!"

"Good…" She let go of him and leaned back in her seat slightly tilting her head back into the seat. She was starting to feel like Supergirl. "Now, start driving…"

"Sure, thing…" Kyle pulled out his keys and started the engine. "…Supergirl." He grinned at her.

"Just drive, Kyle…" Mandy beamed to him flirtatiously.

"So…" He looked as he pulled out and turned onto to Main Street. "You can fly… and bend steel bars… and… and… and bullets bounce off your…" He grinned goofily. "Chest…"

"Yes, they do…" Mandy was starting to believe it.

"Maybe we could go on a date this weekend…" He became presumptuous. "…And you could take me flying?"

"Maybe…" Mandy grinned at the attention as Kyle stopped at a light on the way to Outdoor Man.

"So, how'd you get your powers?" Kyle had a million questions to ask while they were stopped.

"I don't really like talking about it, but…" She looked up to a guy who came up outside Kyle's door, pulling it open and waving a gun in his face. Barely able to act, Kyle took a spilt second to realize what was going on. He just looked at the gun in his face as Mandy started screaming.

"I'm in a hurry!" Manny Gutierrez was fleeing cops wanting to arrest him for the murder of a pawnshop broker. When they came in his apartment, he went out his bathroom, dropped twenty feet and ran the block as police cars sped to the scene and started searching the area with a warrant for his arrest. Mandy stopped grinning and started screaming as Kyle was grabbed by his hair and pulled out with his seat belt still holding him in to the cab of his truck. He wasn't getting out fast enough, and Gutierrez was in a hurry. He cocked his stolen Magnum revolver from the front of his pants, a weapon that linked him to twelve more local crimes, and pointed it to the back of Kyle's head. His blue eyes looked to Mandy sitting in stark terror at what was happening.

"Mandy!"

Police from down the block came running as the revolver was fired straight up into the air and dinged off a cell phone tower. Feeling his underwear splitting him up from between his legs, Gutierrez was forced to let Kyle go as his head was pounded once then twice into the back of Kyle's truck. Struggling to right himself, Kyle's eyes saw two statuesque long legs in red boots and then a short red skirt as his eyes panned up to the blonde goddess saving his life. From the curb, police watched as Bridget stopped a potentially fatal car jacking, dropped their arrest into the street with his underwear band up over his head and then lifted Kyle up into his truck.

"Light's green…" She beamed eye-to-eye to him closed his car door then lifted off again.

"Yes, ma'am…" Kyle applied pressure to the gas pedal and streaked through the crossing back to work, briefly looking back as police pulled Gutierrez up out of the street to arrest him. His heart pounding, his eyes wide with shock, Kyle realized he was close to doing seventy in town and started slowing down. Mandy was still pressed to the door with her mouth hanging open. Did that really just happen to her?

"So…" Kyle spoke upset to be deceived. "Tell me again about your powers?!" He grumbled embarrassingly.

"Just drive, Kyle…"

"The following morning," Howard continued his blog. "Our Kryptonian goddess was playing whack-a-mole with two suspected terrorists at Pittsburgh International Airport…." He chuckled a bit. "Of course, at this point for these morons, it's more like, why even bother trying…"

The incident Howard was describing involved Kirk Kettner, a TSA baggage clerk who ran the metal detector scanning and security post in the airport to screen and process the thousand of travelers and tourists that came his way every day. A twenty-something non-descript and thin stature of a man, Kirk at one time thought he was doomed to an unhappy future as the sidekick to Wendall Hackett, a curly-topped blonde would be pop star he surreptitiously had been calling "Stainer" since high school, a nick-name which practically demanded its own legend. His future changed to not-so bleak when Molly McCleish, a curvaceous and extremely beautiful modern Marilyn Monroe look-alike who had befriended him and decided that he was potential boyfriend material. When they locked eyes on each other through the path of the metal scanner, a proud happy light rush to Kirk's face and Molly grinned with an embarrassed glee to be the light in his life.

"Ma'am…" Kirk coyly approached her with his wand. "Are you carrying any metal on your person?"

"No, sir…" She flirted back to him with a grin filling her face. To anyone watching, it seemed pretty routine, but Hackett rolled his eyes at their gooey love affair and helped a lady pass through to her flight.

"Guys, really? Here?" He checked and passed Paul Hennessey heading back home to Detroit from covering the local Philadelphia Eagles game against the Seattle Sea-Hawks. Looking back at the buxom beauty himself, Paul was also smitten by her looks, but Molly also reminded him of his daughter. On these flights to cover all these games, Paul always got window seats to search the skies for Bridget, and sometimes fantasized her sitting by her on the plane. His broken heart pined so much to have her back in his life again, but when he picked up these other local newspapers with accounts of her activities, he felt closer to her and proud of her at the same time.

"Sorry, Stainer…" Kirk helped his favorite girl make her plane. "So, will you be back for my birthday?" He looked back to Molly.

"I wouldn't miss it." Molly shined to him brightly. "I want to be there when you unwrap your present."

"Do you have to be there for me to unwrap it?" He smirked thinking it was her in lingerie.

"Maybe…" She smirked and kissed Kirk while Hackett processed two Middle Eastern businessmen in long overcoats. It was miserable outside and raining lightly which was typical for Pittsburgh this time of year. The booth buzzed on the man's coat, and Hackett stepped forward to check his person with the wand.

"Sir, any money, keys or other metal objects on your person?"

"No, nothing like that…." Haran Bassir looked to his associate and looked back. "Just let me pass, I don't want to miss my plane."

He spoke in an Iraqi accent.

"Is there a problem here?" Kirk turned around bolstered by his confidence in impressing Molly at his job.

"No, no problem…" The bearded Middle Eastern tourist sounded as if he was straining his anger, but the booth buzzed again on his associate and security started drifting closer to check it out just as Kassim Al-Benbhad pulled out his modified plastic and wooden AK-47. Their supplier had claimed the aluminum metal components would not appear in a metal detector, but there was enough iron fittings to set them off. Guard Craig Luttrell was shot first to the shoulder and then Brad Dandridge reaching for his gun. People through the airport screamed and started running with chaos occurring next. It all happened in less than a second for the world to go crazy. Molly's eyes rounded halfway to the walkway to the plane hearing behind her the spray of bullets striking the ceiling and walls of the airport. These men did not care who they killed or what their bullets destroyed. Mechanic Jack Atwater heard the gunfire all the way to the tarmack and saw the burst of light through the windows. Ticket agent Devon Debruck looked up with shock to hear the sounds coming from Kirk and Stainer's gate. At first, it sounded like loud fireworks but then the screams and cries for help started and security alarms went off around the airport. Collecting his watch, keys and cell phone from the plastic tray, Paul looked up to see Bassir hoist his own weapon and spray the room with bullets and carnage, turning to face him in the process. He was hesitating a bit too long. He knew that and someone else did too. A hand emerged out of thin air and caught the bullet in her hand, spun around and pushed her father to the floor with her long blonde locks parting to reveal the angry look in her face and her furious clenched teeth. The barrage of shots striking her head, chest and abdomen felt like eraser-tips of pencils bouncing off her skin and face, leaving several holes in her pastel blue and red costume. Paul and Bridget's eyes met very briefly as she vaulted up into the air left leg extended and struck Bassir fifty feet behind him back through the metal detector and beyond back to the end of the line where cowering tourists watched him crash through a large plastic display showing sights to see and visit in Pittsburgh. Her other foot clipped Al-Benbhad up the side of his body as he went sailing and crashing through the window, dropping on the other side of it twenty-five feet into hard concrete by his shoulder and then the flat of his back to follow; his weapon shattering into several pieces by him. Doctors would later say he would never stand straight ever again. Her attack was even quicker than the attack that had started it. Travelers, tourists, employees and security now surveyed the disaster zone with Bridget rolling once across the floor and landing on her feet. Her eyes looked to her father briefly with a happy grin, then she spun around and melted into the air like an apparition moving too fast for anyone's eyes to see her. Security now had Bassir, but they filled the room now looking for more injured and possible fatalities. Kirk rushed to check Molly himself.

"She looks nothing like Ashley Tisdale!" Stainer stood up again. "Definitely Carrie Underwood!"

"You okay?" Kirk asked Molly and pulled her close.

"Yes…" Molly forced a scared giggle and tried to vanish into his embrace. "She was incredible!"

"You're welcome…." Paul's heart was melting with joy to see his baby girl in person.

"Meanwhile in the incorporated community of San Difrangeles…" Howard continued. "One of the smaller defunct little towns absorbed by Los Angeles in the 1940s, our cutie from Krypton showed up at the former Sacred Heart Hospital, now planned for demolition sometime soon, but was she using it as her own Fortress of Solitude? No. She was making drug dealers wish the hospital was still in business…"

Leon and Carlos Ramos were two young men in their twenties, but they both already had extensive rap sheets that included, attempted murder, theft, vandalism, burglary and possession. Their uncle had given them jobs in his construction company for them to change and establish new and better lives, but instead, they started selling off his tools, stealing from petty cash and arriving late for work if they arrived at all. In the former hospital, they were looking for forgotten drugs and anything else they could exploit when they were surprised by Doctor Percy Cox, Dr. Chris Turkleton and retired nurse Carla Turkleton, Chris's very pregnant wife. They were looking for a forgotten dialysis machine for a sick girl at St. Thomas, not two rejects from human society now posing as wastes of human life.

"I want five bags of ketamine, three bags of Flunitrazephram and five very large bags of benzodiazepan otherwise someone becomes a widow!" Carlos cocked his grandfather's stolen police revolver into Carla's head and threatened to shoot her. Leon waved his gun from Chris to Cox threatening to shoot the first one who moved. Carla stared to Chris scared to breath or even talk.

"Look here, Lucy and Ethel…" Cox was never known to be subtle nor sensitive. "There are much easier way to kill yourselves than by dragging it out using chemicals and illegal substances. Might I recommend Drano or placing a live wire in your mouth? It might not be as pretty but it gets you the exact same result five hundred times quicker!"

"Dude!" Chris was also called Turk by his close friend J.D. now practicing near Seattle. "This is my wife's life you're risking!" He heard the old place creak with a rush of wind. Everyone's eyes turned to the presence of the statuesque blonde beauty in the Kryptonian uniform.

"Who's getting their underwear pulled over their head first?" Bridget slightly narrowed her eyes and crossed her arms over the big red "S" on her chest to make then realize she meant business. Turk dropped his jaw in shock, Cox scowled in disbelief and Leon made a run down the long hall. A second later, Carlos tossed Carla out of his grasp and high-tailed it after his brother like a bat out of hell. Bridget ran between Turk and Cox to get them to justice.

"Get them, Super-Babe, get them!"

A few seconds later there were a few fruitless gunshots echoing in the old hospital and then the sound of glass being shattered out of Dr. Bob Kelso's old office. Falling straight down into a pit of trash, garbage and debris from gutted rooms and offices, Leon hit the interior of the dumpster first. Carlos came right down on to of him. Standing outside the dumpster and dumping trash from his residence along with two old TVs and an old mattress, Glenn Matthews, the former Sacred Heart Janitor, watched the two punks fall down from out of no where and hit the center of the dumpster along with all the debris and wreckage pulled from the condemned hospital. When Leon lifted his head up to crawl out, Matthews punched him to the face.

"Morons…" He mumbled under breath.

"And back to New York City," Howard continued. "Just last night, Supergirl broke into the New York City Forensics lab…" He paused. "And it's not what you think, but it seems a corrupt business CEO trying to cover up a history of extortion, insider-trading, stock manipulation and several murders decided to blow the lab up to cover up the most recent of his crimes…" Howard chuckled trying to picture it. "And despite umpteen security cameras and computer surveillance, no one got a single picture of her grabbing up the explosives hidden in the building and shooting into the sky with them." He paused once more. "They said you could see the explosion off New York Bay as far away as New Jersey and Woodmere, New York…"

At the time of the distraction, detective Mac Taylor was assisting detective Horatio Caine on a case involving a serial killer up from Miami, and detective Don Flack with lawyer Donovan Stark were in the trace lab analyzing their evidence on Howard Asner, the CEO of the Trident Corporation. Stories of Asner being corrupt and untouchable were well known in the police department. Witnesses either got paid or vanished, evidence was often missing or tainted in efforts to bring him to justice, but than Asner was believed to have judges, senators and congressmen in his pocket. The murder of newspaper reporter Marcy Moore could be the nail to put a chip in his sterling public image, but as pathologist Dr. Sheldon Hawks scrutinized Moore's incinerated remains for more trace, Bridget charged his lab, ripped the door off one of the body vaults and surprised him.

"What the hell?" He looked at her and her costume, but his attention was focused on the bomb she was removing from the vault. "Is that what I think it is?"

"You might want to stand back…" Bridget clutched it to her chest to contain the blast and hastened out of the room past Detective Stella Bonasera for the trace lab. Flack and Stark had a brief glimpse of her punching her hand into the air-conditioning vent and removing another bomb left by a phony janitor. By now, Hawks had hit the alarm to evacuate the building. Detectives and employees stopped what they were doing and raced for the exits. Mac looked back briefly as Bridget flipped the desk in his office out of her way, pulled another bomb from the overhead AC vent and smashed her way out of the building through the window. Three seconds after that, a fishing trawler in the bay reported an explosion seven miles off Liberty Island that turned the night into day for twelve minutes. What he didn't describe was Bridget in the lower stratosphere spinning head over feet several times over several dozen feet and struggling to right herself. The blast had torn up her sleeve into ribbons down to her invulnerable skin up the shoulder and left a large burning hole in her costume around her upper right leg, side and part of her back. When she finally stopped spinning, she was hovering over the seaside village of Johnny's Corners on the north shore of New Jersey.

"Wow…" She commented. "What was in that thing?" There wasn't much left of the explosive to give to the police, and she couldn't just go threaten Asner for hiring the people who planted the explosives, but she did know the police footage of the shady janitor who planted the bomb might lead back to Asner when questioned. She just had to protect his life for a few months so Asner's sinister lawyers couldn't arrange an accident to take him out. Right now, she needed one of her spare costumes, and she had the one Samantha had woven for her at her old apartment at the Whittendale Tower which she kept as Linda Kent. Judging her bearings from the patterns of lights under her on Earth, she started cruising back into Manhattan on a leisurely breeze moving fifty miles an hour over the city. As she descended lower to read the landmarks, her cell phone rang and she placed her ear bud to her ear.

"Talk to me."

"Penny? Where you?" He was sitting alone in Risotto's, one of the top five Italian restaurant's in Pasadena.

"Leonard…" Bridget hovered over the bay off the south end of Manhattan. They had a date tonight! She had forgotten all about it! This had been the busiest weekend she had had in over a month. "I'm so sorry! I can be there in a few minutes!" Forgetting about her costume, she dived toward Manhattan and used the speed she picked up to vanish off the radar from La Guardia Airport and streak across upper New Jersey. Through his phone, Leonard heard her air turbulence through her phone at two hundred miles an hour and getting worse. Lowering his cell phone confused, he scowled a bit then lifted it again.

"Are you in a tunnel?"

"No…" Bridget slowed to talk. "Look, just hold on, I will…"

"No, that's okay…" Leonard sighed. "You're busy trying to be an actress. We can do this another time."

"No, Leonard, it's not like that! It's just…" He hung up and her ear-bud disconnected the connection. Bridget's heart sank despite the fact she was floating over Nashville, Tennessee. She was really feeling like a horrible person. Just a few more minutes, that's all she needed, just a few more. She cared about Leonard; she hated the fact that her real life came between her and him. To make it worse, she heard fire engines racing down Broadway in the Music City. That was the topper to this miserable night. She was going to heading home with a shredded costume from the explosion and smelling like burning wood cinders again, and her next closest intact costume was in a haunted bed and breakfast she owned in New Orleans. Feeling low and overwhelmed, she looked up trying her muster her personal self-worth, then dived to Earth and rescued fire-fighter Chad Danvers from getting killed in a blaze started by bored teenagers.


	23. Chapter 23

23

Several years ago after the mysterious blonde started appearing in the skies in the Supergirl costume, she had appeared near the Fort Marshall Army Base near Charleston, South Carolina and stopped what might have been one of the most potential disasters in the history of the base. A local Army official named Sergeant George Polarski had walked into the local Hump Bar strapped in dynamite, and while upset over losing his disinterested wife, he had tried to blow up himself and his estranged wife with the other by-standers at the local watering hole, but Bridget had stormed the location back then and saved the lives of everyone at the location. Since then, the local high school was the home of one of the first if not the largest Supergirl Fan Sites on the Internet, selling everything from Supergirl T-Shirts and caps to allegedly autographed photos to raise money for the children of soldiers who had lost their lives over seas. One of the Hump Bar survivors was Amanda Holden, the daughter of the camp commander, and when she went off to college, her sister, Emmalin, maintained the website and merchandise orders before passing it on to others. The camp radio station even had recurring segments where listeners could call in with sightings. Camp radio hostess Pamela Moran had never seen the flying blonde herself, but she loved listening to all the crazy and fascinating stories with amazement and wonder. A lot of the teenagers living on base were fans of the Supergirl sightings, and local kid, William Carver, who had transferred to Fort Marshall with his stepfather from Fort Collins in Colorado, had his own Supergirl Fan Club Website. After talking about the phenomenon with her friends, Roxy and Denise, Pam thought the story might be interesting to talk about at the base radio station. However, after learning authoress Natalie Green was in the area doing research on her, she had to ask the chubby Eastland High School graduate if she'd like to talk about her research on the radio.

"So, Natalie…" Pam started after introducing her on the radio. "This isn't just some guy's comic book-driven hallucination."

"No, girls feel empowered by her too." Natalie announced. "In fact, three of the top twelve Supergirl websites are created by young girls."

"Seriously?"

"Seriously! I'm in Charleston writing a female perspective on this whole Supergirl phenom." The cute chubby authoress lit up. "I've been talking to Professor Danielle Cuoco of the Sociology Department at the University of South Carolina, and we've been coming up with some great insights about her popularity."

"Do you really think a girl can fly and resist bullets and everything else she's been doing?" Pam looked back at Natalie across from her.

"Let the guys figure that out…" Natalie spoke up. "Forget Madonna, forget Britney Spears… female celebs can never keep the worst events of their lives from hitting the tabloids, but Super-Girl… or whatever she calls herself… everywhere she shows up great things happen. Women realize they can fight back too and take charge. We don't need to fly or flip over cars… we can do everything a man can do and just as well as they can."

"And when was the last time Bigfoot or the Loch Ness Monster did that…"

"She's not a ghost…" Natalie shined gleefully. "She is barely being considered a figment of someone's imagination. This girl is real despite what the media and experts claim. More and more people are seeing her everyday, and everywhere she goes, wonderful things happen. Crime rates go down. Poverty levels change. Jobs appear… When was the last time Bigfoot even saved someone's life?"

"Well, how about…" Pamela was silently handed a note from the officer who managed her radio segment. "Oh, well, my manager says we have Howard Wolowitz, the creator of the _Incredible Supergirl Sightings Database_, on the line." Pam checked the telephone lines. "Howard, you're on with Pamela. You have something to say?"

"Thank you, Pamela…" Howard was on his computer at home. "And may I say your voice is just as beautiful as you must be."

"Well, thank you, Howard…" Pam shined to get such a compliment from a guy over the radio.

"I just wanted to say I agree with Miss Green." Howard talked over a headset patched into his bedroom computer as he paced back and forth in his room. "Supergirl is a lot more than just some phenomenon that keeps appearing in the news. She's not just a role model for girls, she's a goddess."

"Howard…" Natalie interjected. "In my experience the guys who refer to her as a goddess are usually referring solely to her physical looks and appearance. Grantly, she's very attractive, but my book is more about how she proves to women that we're not victims. We can fight back, take charge, be someone…"

"I am all for women's rights." Howard added. "Look, I confess. I used to be the kind of guy women hated. I used to try every sleazy disgusting line in the book trying to get…"

"Howard…" Pam quickly interceded. "This is a family program."

"Attention." Howard changed his line of thought. "But since I started this site, I've noticed guys are divided between proving her existence and debating on the sources of her powers and origins and guys who just worship her because they think she's hot. Meanwhile, every girl logged into my message boards has confessed how Supergirl gave them the confidence and conviction to improve their lives, stand up for themselves or just stick it to another guy. Heck, even my girlfriend Bernadette, she's a microbiologist here at Cal Tech… she…"

"Cal Tech? Wait a second…" Pamela stopped him. "Howard, you're in California? This station only broadcasts near Charleston."

"I'm picking up your feed and sending it to a station in Atlanta, bouncing it to Nashville to send it to Tulsa to broadcast it to Dallas to a satellite over Hawaii and then to myself." He mused over his mastery over the airwaves. "Just a short hop for someone who can turn a lamp off in Tokyo."

"Oh, my god…" Natalie started grinning about to start laughing. "He's a science geek!"

"Recognized!" Howard responded. He was taping and recording the segment for his website.

"Howard!" His mother's voice echoed through the house and revealed to the viewing audience that he lived with his mother. "There's two men here to see you!"

"Well, that's a Jewish mother if I ever heard one!" Natalie couldn't stop grinning. Pam was laughing out loud. Howard felt deflated to be embarrassed on the radio.

"I gotta go…" Howard winced and wished for his own place. "Excuse me, ladies…" He signed off at his computer and pulled his headset off and screamed back to his heavyset mother. "For the love of God, ma, I was on the radio! You embarrassed me in front of millions of people!"

"Well, pardon me, Walter Cronkite!"

Tall and good-looking with a brooding intensity, Sam Winchester mused trying not to laugh in the Wolowitz's living room. Dean looked up from the plastic covers on the Sixties-era furniture, and looked as if he was holding back an explosion of laughter. Looking up again, they noticed Howard descending the stairs in blue trousers with a thick white belt and blue Superman belt buckle and a green long-sleeved sweater with thin blue and black stripes matching his high collar. His soft-soled shoes matched the color of his trousers. Dean looked at his Beatles haircut and wanted to ask him if Paul McCartney was alive, but a look from his brother stopped him.

"Hi, Howard…" Sam took charge. "I'm Sam Winchester, this is my brother, Dean." They shook hands.

"Hi…" Howard reacted mystified because Raj was the only person who ever came to see him at home. "How can I help you guys?" He gestured for them to sit on the plastic-covered yellow floral couch.

"Well, Howard…" Dean cleared his throat and looked to his brother. "We're kind of what you might call paranormal researchers… We investigate stuff that fall outside the perimeters of what's normal…"

"Okay…"

"Howard…" Sam spoke. "Several times on your site you've made references that would suggest that you know who Supergirl really is, and quite frankly, we'd like to follow up on that. You see, in our experience, beings that claim to be gods or have turned out to be gods are usually…Well…"

"Motivated by other intentions…" Dean took over. "Howard, if you have any idea of who you think this girl really is, you have to tell us so we can check her out. Even if she isn't, we have to make sure she's not like… really a demon…"

"You're kidding, right?" Howard lightly chuckled. "Are you kidding me? She's hot! She saves people."

"Howard…" Sam and his brother looked at each other. "Trust us. We know what we're doing. We encountered angels and demons, gods and demigods…"

"You know who she is, don't you?" Dean replied. Someone else had arrived. The doorbell rang as Howard looked at the Winchesters, gasped a bit stunned and unsure then chuckled a bit.

"Howard, someone's at the door!" His mother screamed from the back porch.

"I heard it!" He screamed into her direction then rose from the end of the sofa. "Look guys," He strolled past the brothers to answer the door. "I confess… there's been a few girls at my place of work I've half-heartedly wondered about, some of them a bit amusingly, and then there's this girl at…" He opened the door. "Agent Mulder?"

Sam and Dean looked nervous and stood straight up.

"Hello, Howard…" Fox Mulder strolled in wearing a long dark overcoat over his blue suit and dark blue tie. Ever since he gone public on Syfy Radio about his belief in extra-terrestrials, every geeky fan-boy, Trekkie and science fiction enthusiast adjacent to modern alien folklore knew he was. Striding in past Howard, Mulder sighed, looked at the Winchesters and cocked his ahead annoyingly to the side. "Didn't I tell you guys to leave this one alone?'

"We were just doing research…" Sam answered.

"Yeah, following a hunch…" Dean added.

"Why don't you get out of here…" Mulder told the brothers. "Otherwise the next time my wife runs into you guys I'll have her lock you guys up."

"Sounds good to me!" Dean mugged and followed his brother who was scratching his head out as they departed the house. Unsure what was happening, Howard looked to the brothers to the former agent turned author and then rubbed his head trying to figure out this experience. Heading out, Sam turned to Howard.

"Dude, your mother, I suggest Jenny Craig…" He grinned with far nobler intentions. Howard scoffed a bit shaking his head then turned in awe of the man who had very nearly ousted the truth on Area 51, the Bermuda Triangle and the government's connection to UFO research. Mulder looked back out the door then back to him.

"Howard…" He looked at him with a deep secret broiling and festering deep in his head. "Do me a favor… don't be talking to guys like that about you-know-who."

"Why not?" Howard mugged a bit and postured briefly as he realized what he thought was the truth. "Oh my god. I'm close to realizing the truth, aren't I? I'm about to figure out who she really is, aren't I?"

"Howard… all those guys want to do is exploit you to find out more about…" Mulder hesitated and looked away. "You-know-who…" The former FBI agent and paranormal investigator reached out and took Howard by his shoulder like a father taking his son to give him advice. "Who she is… is not nearly as important as what she is or what she's doing."

"Oh my god…" Howard realized the truth behind something he had only assumed. "The FBI has a file on her! She's an agent!"

"Stop talking to Riley Poole…"

"She's Penny, isn't she? I knew it!"

"That's not her real name…" Mulder continued to keep Bridget's secret.

"How close am I?" Howard followed him down off her porch just as the Winchesters drove away. "Is she someone from work? Bernadette? Is she Bernadette?!"

"Have you tried getting your mother to eat more salad?" Mulder strolled off the porch pretending to be distracted, but he only frustrated Howard even more. Eventually realizing he was not getting any further, Howard raced back to his computer and tried comparing his collection of photos to every image of Penny, but that infernal psychic cloaking device of the princess of power made comparing her to anyone impossible. He could match Penny by body type to certain images but not to others. Worse yet, in some others where he had practically perfect photos, Supergirl looked like she really could be Kelly Clarkson, Ashley Tisdale or even Reese Witherspoon. Could the "Celebrity Prankers" episode be closer to the truth than he thought or was Justin Russo correct? Was Supergirl really a spirit that hoped into the bodies of certain women in the proximity of certain incidents or disasters who then vanished and disappeared at will? More than convinced he was close to breaking her identity, Howard stayed home from joining the guys for World of Warcraft and spent the night separating his collection of a thousand and seven hundred and eighteen photos, erasing duplicates and sorting them by possible body types and aliases. Once again, Reese Witherspoon, Ashley Tisdale, Carrie Underwood and Penny from across the guy's apartment topped his best candidates, but others suggested Kelly Clarkson, Jessica Simpson, Kate Upton and even in a really weird photo from Germany, Mila Kunis. He had even tried calling Penny five times with new stunts trying to get her to confess. She hung up on him twice, and once got that weird wind tunnel effect again over the call. It seemed his only way of busting her would be catching her in costume on the street, but if her rumors of being clairvoyant were true, she'd vanish before he could close. Sometimes he thought he had busted her a long time ago and had been brainwashed to forget her secret again. His only hope was to run his photos all through a computer algorithm that merged every image into a computer-rendered extrapolation, but it was pushing three o'clock in the morning and he had to work the next day. At lunch the next day, he sat down with the tuna fish lunch his mother had made him, yawned as he reached for his drink and drifted off to sleep. Leonard scowled confusingly at him. Sheldon sighed with pompous dissent and Raj truly worried over his buddy.

"What's with Howard?" Leonard asked.

"Well, besides the fact that he's just structural engineer…" Sheldon could not stop himself from taking a chance to insult the people around him. "He still lives with his mother, he's short and he thinks that hairstyle is still contemporary." He paused. "Or were you referring to something in particular."

Leonard and Raj looked at him trying to figure him out again.

"I meant how exhausted he is!"

"He was up last night trying to figure out who Supergirl really is." Raj knew the truth. "He thinks he's close to cracking her identity."

"I heard…" Leonard ate his turkey sandwich. "Penny said he called her at least five times last night. She told me if she was Supergirl that she'd kick his ass past Jupiter for harassing her like that."

"Oh, that's ridiculous." Sheldon spoke.

"I know."

"There is no way a community college drop-out from Nebraska like Penny could possibly be Supergirl." Sheldon once again revealed his disdain for the people around him. "And besides, if she was Supergirl, she'd have to be from Kansas or Texas, and if she did kick Howard toward Jupiter, the planet's massive gravitational pull would suck him in to it."

Raj and Leonard looked at each other. One of them had to say it.

"Why Texas?" Raj took a chance.

"Because I'm from there." Sheldon answered. "And because its home to the Houston Space Central."

Raj and Leonard squirmed and made annoyed faces as Sheldon once more placed himself close to the edge of the crazy scale.

"Although she could logically be from Nevada." Sheldon added.

"Why?" Leonard was scared to ask.

"Area Fifty-One…" Sheldon continued. For once, the guys realized he had a point, and Howard seemed to snap out of his unexpected nap and jarred himself awake. Thinking he had zoned out for a few seconds, he opened his eyes wide trying to refresh himself and yawned.

"Howard, you've got to give up this Penny is Supergirl thing." Leonard sounded as he bit into his sandwich.

"But I'm so close…" The exhausted Jewish engineer shrugged and contorted in his seat trying to wake. "I'm going to see if Matt Galecki in the computer programming can help me create some photo reconstruction software like the FBI uses to create their photo renderings. I'm going to download all the pictures I have and let the program recreate her face and body type from the photos."

"What does Bernadette think about this obsession of yours?" Leonard wondered.

"She doesn't mind…" Howard mused secretly. "Sometimes we even role-play with her in the costume…" He chuckled a bit as Leonard then Sheldon groaned. Raj covertly was picturing it himself still not completely over his infatuation for the curvy biologist.

"And besides…" Howard continued boasting. "Because of my appearance on the radio, " He grinned cockily. "The Fox Network has offered me a seat in an up-coming TV discussion, _Supergirl: Myth or Mystery_, and I get to take a guest to the taping."

"Bernadette?"

"No, actually she's got to work."

"Who are you taking?" Raj asked.

"I can't make it either." Sheldon spoke up. "I think I'm about to make a break-through in my negative causality work."

Everyone looked at him.

"I wasn't going to ask!" Howard didn't understand why Sheldon would assume he would be the guest. Sheldon just lifted his head and looked blankly toward him. "We're going to be discussing who she could be, who she isn't, how her powers work and where she could come from." He mused before them and took a bit of the sandwich his mother made for him.

"I think she's Billie Daniels." Raj announced.

"The daughter of our landlord?" Sheldon responded dubious of the thought. "Where do you get that theory?"

"Priya met her in New York last Friday and sent me a photo of her, and get this…" He paused and leaned into the table. "She looks exactly like Penny." He responded as if they were gossipy old ladies. Sheldon looked at Howard who looked at Leonard turning to Howard trying to wake by sipping his Pepsi. Raj nodded as if he had solved the riddle. "I was thinking… what if Penny is not who she says she is? Maybe she doesn't work for Mrs. Kent and her daughter, maybe she is her daughter."

"Penny's not rich, and she doesn't own the building." Leonard shook his head in disbelief.

"Then why does she look so much like Billie Daniels?" Raj knew an odd coincidence. "You'd think if you knew someone who looked a lot like someone, you'd want to tell everyone."

"Maybe Penny isn't conscious of the similarity." Howard sat and ate his sandwich.

"I've often wondered…" Sheldon highjacked the conversation. "Could you imagine if there was another person who looked exactly like me? I mean, they wouldn't be as gifted as myself, of course, but wouldn't it be a wonderful thing to experience?"

"Well, it depends…" Howard looked at Sheldon. "Is your look-alike also a huge ass?"

Sheldon lowered his sandwich and stared at Howard briefly over his wisecrack.

"For the love of God…" Leonard winced and looked at Raj with a look of tired exasperation and forlorn disbelief. "Between Howard thinking Penny's Supergirl and you now thinking Penny's an heiress, I'm starting to wonder what is in the water you guys are drinking!"

"Leonard, come on!" Howard took over. "Think about it. Look at the clues! One: a majority of out of focus Supergirl look like Penny…"

"Or Reese Witherspoon…" Leonard added. "Or Ashley Tisdale or a blonde Jessica Alba…"

"Or Mila Kunis!" Raj responded. "I saw the photos from Germany, dude…" He looked to Howard.

"Two: my friend, Kerry, thought Penny was her long-lost sister, Bridget…" Howard added.

"Two people who look like Penny?" Sheldon and Leonard exchanged glances.

"Three: we really have no idea what Penny is doing when she claims she's working…"

"She's an actress, she goes on auditions…"

"And four: we have this girl that looks exactly like Penny." Howard stopped Leonard from talking. "Now, hear me out, what if Penny is helping hide Billie because Billie Daniels is, dare I say it, really Supergirl?"

"Or maybe…" Raj developed his idea a bit further. "Both Penny and Billie are Supergirl and they takes turns…"

"That is the most ridiculous theory you two have come up yet…" Sheldon announced.

"Thank you…" Leonard was glad to hear that at least Sheldon was being rational.

"Because there is no way Penny could possibly be Supergirl without me figuring it out first!" Sheldon pointed out, and Leonard suddenly found himself the only rational person at the table.

"And besides…" Sheldon continued. "May I remind you that Supergirl can't have her picture taken, and yet, Billie Daniels can…."

"I forgot about that." Howard continued eating the sandwich his mother made for him.

"Maybe she got her picture taken because she's in her secret identity…." Raj pointed out as Sheldon fell quiet. Looking at Leonard then Howard, the egocentric physicist leaned back and took a bite of his sandwich.

"Well?" Leonard looked at him.

"He's still wrong."

"Why am I wrong?"

"Because there is no way Penny could possibly be Supergirl without me figuring it out first!" He announced in a little huff and continued eating his lunch. Raj and Howard shared glances themselves and leaned back in their seats. Across from Raj, Leonard sipped his juice then leaned back in his seat with a knowing grin.

"All I know is…" He began. "…Is that Billie Daniels's mother, Linda Kent, was in Toronto last week and photographed, and she looks nothing like Penny's mother, Jamie Parker, who we've met, along with her father, Ralph Parker, and her sister, Sabrina Parker, who we've also met along with Harvey, her brother-in-law!"

At that moment, Penny's parents were in Los Angeles at the City Hall Building. In their real lives, he was Ralph Hinkley, a former Palmdale teacher turned superintendent of schools for Los Angeles County, and Jaime Sommars, a former tennis pro who became a teacher and now worked as director for a program that took care of special needs children. They had a bit more in common in their pasts. They had both in some form or another had been just like Penny in some aspect. Hinkley was a former superhuman champion during the Eighties after an alleged UFO incident in the desert masterminded by beings claiming to be extra-terrestrials. Following a skydiving accident and a near-death experience in her youth, Jaime had experienced her own lifetime of superheroics for the government after being convinced she had cybernetic bionic limbs. While she had been mentored by the now defunct Organization of Scientific Intelligence, Ralph had been brought up alongside the late Bill Maxwell of the FBI, but they had both lost any superhuman abilities they once had when they each got married; Ralph to his girlfriend, lawyer Pamela Davidson, and Jaime to former astronaut, Colonel Steve Austin. They had both encountered Bridget as their successor a few years ago, and when she needed someone to play the role of her parents, they were there for her. In Hinkley's office at City Hall, they were colleagues as Jamie looked to Ralph for assistance to find a new school location for her special needs kids. As Ralph looked over his map of empty local schools, a knock came to his door and he looked up to Bridget entering the room in her white shirt and blue jeans.

"Bridget…" Ralph grinned.

"Hi, sweetie…" Jaime hugged the girl as if she was her own daughter. "How are you doing? Are Leonard and Howard asking about your parents again?"

"No…" Bridget looked up forlornly. "I need… I need advice. I'm conflicted. I just can't keep dancing between two worlds anymore." She looked to Jaime and back to Ralph for guidance.

"What brought this on?" Ralph asked.

"Being what I am is ruining my friendship with Leonard," Bridget confessed. "Last week, I had to lie to Raj's sister, Priya, in New York, and it's still tearing me up inside."

Both Jamie and Ralph looked at her and then each other. They had been there. The lies, the awkward stories and incidents, the secret lives…

"I can't just quit this life and move again like I did as Billie or Chloe…" Bridget was distraught and miserable. "I'm a lot closer to these guys…"

"The guys?" Jaime wondered. "Or Leonard."

"I can't do it anymore." Bridget looked desperate. "I can't stand not having a life." She looked to Jaime and Ralph for guidance. "I can't stand lying to my friends, and yet, I don't want to give up what I'm doing. I love being able to help people, but… when does it get easier? I miss my family, and I'm losing Leonard. I have all these powers, and yet, I can't solve my own problems."

"Oh, honey…" Jaime reached out and pulled Bridget close. Ralph groaned trying to think of an insightful answer, but he struggled with it too. He gave up the heroics thing when Pam got pregnant with his daughter, but did he miss it? A little bit. The lost clothes, the awkward lies and the unexplained absences… they were something else.

"Bridget…" He once again became her fatherly voice of reason. "You have to find a balance."

"Where?" Bridget looked at him.

"You draw a line." Jaime pulled Bridget close as if she were her real daughter. "If you've decided to stay as Penny Parker, you can draw a line and decide what to keep in it and what to keep out of it."

"It's not that easy…" Bridget sighed. "Maybe I should have just stayed as Linda Kent and continued living in New York… get a nice house outside the city…"

"Come and go through a cave under the estate, get a butler named Alfred?" Ralph smirked a bit. "Kiddo, that's Batman…"

"I look so good in solid black…" Bridget sounded as if she was considering it then tried to laugh it away, but she was still hurting inside. "I have to stop being Penny Parker… I have to move on again…"

"That's going to break Leonard's heart…." Jaime tried to warn her. "Honey, moving on to another identity is not going to work. You're going to meet more people, bond with them, have these feelings again… If you keep doing that, eventually you're going to have a mental breakdown."

"Penny…" Ralph came around his desk to look the distraught blonde goddess in the eyes. "You need to fix your life now. You've been burying yourself trying to save the world so much that you're neglecting to take care of yourself." He looked into her big blue eyes. "You can find a life in both worlds, but you also have to do what Jaime says and make a line around you and decide what goes in and what stays out."

"Even if it means cutting Leonard out of my life…" Bridget's voice quivered. Ralph and Jaime glanced at each other.

"Are you Penny Parker, Bridget Hennessey… or are you Supergirl?"


	24. Chapter 24

24

His work and laptop in a knapsack on his back, Leonard strolled out to his car in its regular parking spot near the Cal Tech Physics Building then looked around for Sheldon to take him home. He wasn't out yet, but that wasn't unusual. When Sheldon started talking, he often lost track of the time. Unlocking his driver's side door, he slipped into his silver Dodge Neon and placed his pack behind him on the back seat. As he sat and waited at the wheel, he thought about pulling closer to save Sheldon a few steps, but after his rant about Penny at lunch, he wasn't feeling charitable. He pulled out his cell and pulled up Penny's phone number. Sheldon wasn't going to like it, but he was re-scheduling his date with her for tonight.

"Hello?" She responded.

"Hi, Penny. It's me…"

"Hey, Leonard, could you hold on a second?" Bridget was currently in the mountains of Northern Iraq in the ruins of Bel-Tammon, ancient Roman ruins currently used as a temporary base for Iraqi insurgents to hide weapons. By time the Army got here, these terrorists were going to be in the wind so she decided to keep them here a bit longer. Tapping her ear bud to place Leonard on hold, she was getting strafed by bullets from over thirty Iraqi hostiles. They had tried blowing up her seven times, burying her underground in the temple ruins and shooting her out of the sky with a missile, but she just kept coming at them. Her costume from Samantha was really holding up to the damage, but she didn't like the fact it didn't let her perspire. Grabbing the front of one of their military trucks, she hoisted it by its front bumper and hurled it up to come down on their machine gun nests. Terrorists went screaming and running and calling enforcements.

"Hey, Leonard…" She had rolled under a tank and was sticking to the bottom of it. "What's up?"

"Well," Leonard sat in his car in the parking lot of the California Institute of Technology oblivious to what she was doing. "I was thinking about rescheduling our date for tonight? I think I can get our table back at Risottos."

"Really?" Penny dug her feet into the ground and started lifting the tank up over her head, rattling and shaking it to disconcert and knock the spirit out of the men inside it. Artillery shells, machine gun fire and high caliber armor-piercing rounds bounced off of her and struck the ground around her and hit the huge stonewalls of the ruins. "I'm afraid I can't make tonight."

"What's that noise?" Leonard heard her background noise.

"Oh, I'm kind of working as an extra in a low-budget terrorist flick." One of the Iraqi insurgents tried roasting her with a flamethrower, but she dropped the tank on its side in front of him, and he got roasted himself before he could drop the weapon. Several of the terrorists had lost their will to try killing her and were fleeing into the desert, the more sadistic and determined stayed behind to take Bridget out before she could get them.

"Oh, cool!" Leonard was excited. "Who's starring in it?"

"No one you'd know…" Bridget hit a round piece of wreckage with her foot, flipping it up and catching it, hurling it like the chakram of a long forgotten warrior princess as it bounced several times off several surfaces and walls taking several insurgents out in front of it before it lost its energy and momentum and skidded to a stop. Someone tossed another hand grenade at her, but she caught it and hurled it back. The explosion sent several khaki wearing men flying in separate directions.

"It sounds exciting?" Leonard responded in her earpiece. "How about tomorrow?"

"That's not really good for me either…" Through the screams, gunfire and crates of weapons blowing up in the fire, Bridget's mind processed the sounds of American soldiers coming from a mile away. A number of Air Force fighters were getting close to access the area for weapons, and she ran up the side of the ruins and ascended into the air, her fist furled ahead of her before the United States Military could see her. She was already craving Greek for lunch.

"Saturday?" Leonard asked as Sheldon started heading to the car.

"That's not good for me either…" Bridget was riding the air currents toward Crete. "I might not be home tonight."

"What happened to the shooting? Did they stop?" All Leonard heard now was the crackling and buffeting of the wind around her.

"Yeah, I got a break…" Penny slowed to a stop over an Italian liner near Cyprus in the Eastern Mediterranean. She slowed to keep the wind from drowning out her voice. "Right now, I think Monday is free for me. How about then?"

"Then it's a date." Leonard grinned as Sheldon got into the car.

"What's a date?" Sheldon asked as Leonard clicked off his phone.

"I just rescheduled my date with Penny." Leonard grinned excitedly. Sheldon groaned.

"Honestly, Leonard…" Sheldon rolled his eyes. "She didn't even finish college." He recalled the false history Bridget had given for herself the day they first met.

"Einstein didn't finish college and look how far he got."

"Yes, but if he had, he'd have finished his Unified Field Theory; now, wouldn't he?" Sheldon pointed out and Leonard groaned in his seat. On the other side of the planet, Bridget was returning to her favorite Greek restaurant and getting welcomed by the owner and his wife who ran it. She even spoke to them in their native language as American soldiers seized the ruins and started taking prisoners. It was going to be an interesting report for the President to read, but it was not the first time President Dale Gilchrist had received a report from either Homeland Security or the CIA about an alleged blonde girl in a superhero costume taking down terrorists or angry anti-government radicals. He had just assumed her activities were confined to the States, but right now, he tried to find a respite of peace from his duties as a world leader.

Since he had taken his oath of office, President Gilchrist tried to open the White House dining room every Saturday afternoon to lunch guests he could choose, although many of them were guests picked and recommended by his personal assistant. He had invited former President Josiah "Jed" Bartlett to join him himself, and a brief encounter with historian Ben Gates at a party at Mount Vernon led the treasure hunter to be another guest. From the local newspapers, Gilchrist heard how FBI Agent Seeley Booth had solved a forty-three year old murder case through his contacts at the Jeffersonian Institute and decided to meet him as well. Congressman Marty Huggins from North Carolina rounded out the small private affair. Vice President Selina Meyer was expected to join them, but the latest news was she had to cancel.

"How you doing, Dale?" Bartlett shook Gilchrist's hand as he entered the White House dining room.

"Just fine, thanks…" Gilchrist gestured for his guests to sit. Gates and Booth exchanged glances, and Huggins shined to meet the President and actually dine in the White House dinging room guarded by Marine cadets and Secret Service men in the corridor. "Mr. Gates…" Gilchrist looked to the historian and recalled how Ben had sneaked Bartlett out of a private party for information on the President's Secret Book. "We're not going to have any mischief here, are we?"

"Not at all, Mr. President." Ben took his seat.

"Marty…" Gilchrist met the Congressman then turned to Booth. "Agent Booth, it is an honor to have you with me."

"It is my honor, Mr. President…"

"Oh, don't be modest…" Gilchrist shined. "Men, this is one of the top men in the FBI. I feel safer just having him with us." Servants brought in the plates to place before the President's guests. "A forty-three year old murder case of a White House Aide in 1969 that was once deemed unsolvable…"

"Well, sir, I couldn't have done it without the assistance of Dr. Temperance Brennan and her staff at the Jeffersonian. " Booth sipped his juice and looked at his eggs. "They deserve a lot of credit."

"Aren't you forgetting someone, agent?" Bartlett turned his head up. "I read a report where someone tried bombing the Jeffersonian to destroy the evidence in another case, but a blonde in a cape stole the bomb and prevented the explosion."

"I wasn't there when that happened." Booth confessed. "I can't be a witness to what really happened there."

"I heard she did the same thing in New York City…" Marty salted and doused his eggs with pepper. "That girl is really something the way she gets around."

"My grandkids love her…" Bartlett lit up with a smile. "They keep asking if I know who she is."

"I know…" Gilchrist sliced his eggs and ham. "Everyone keeps asking me. Who is she? Who is she?"

"Actually…" Ben looked up from buttering his toast. "I heard a rumor, President Gilchrist, that you had her deputized as a special deputy for the FBI."

"Oh yeah…" Booth mused with a glint to his eyes. "Along with Santa Claus and Paul Bunyan…" He jested to show his skeptical belief in a bulletproof girl who could fly and lift tractor-trailer trucks. Both the current President and former President grinned and shared looks across the table.

"Ben…" Gilchrist's face lit up in amusement. "You know better than to listen to rumors, and besides… as much as I'd personally love to meet this girl, how do you think we could keep such a thing secret?"

"I heard…" Bartlett sipped his orange juice. "That's she's been dumping the worst people on the planet into exile on an island in the South Pacific surrounded by man-eating sharks."

"Maybe that's why you guys haven't found Red John or the Grave-Digger?" Ben wondered about the guy at the top of California's Most Wanted and one D.C. serial killer. Booth and Gates stared at each other across the table. "How about the huge illegal marijuana farms that have been mysteriously burned up, the umpteen tons of cocaine dumped in the ocean, hundreds of meth labs and criminal rings busted… In one year, she's located a hundred and seventy-five wanted criminals in the FBI database." Ben was provoking Booth. "She's kind of putting you guys out of business."

Booth quietly ate part of his omelet.

"I haven't seen her…" Booth responded. "Until then, I'm skeptical that she exists…"

"Really…" Ben leaned back and studied Booth from across the table. "What about this secret file I hear the FBI has on this girl…" He tried to get a reading on Booth. "Is the name of her secret identity in there?"

"There is no secret file…" Booth maintained his decorum then changed his attitude. "Where are you getting this stuff? From your friend, Riley Poole?"

"Well, he is a fan…"

"I've seen her." Marty spoke up. Briefly using his napkin to dab his lips, he held up a finger to pause the conversation and sip his grape juice. "Yes, I've seen her…" His Southern accent danced through his words. "Do you all recall those storms that hit the southeast part of my state some time back? The one that mysteriously blocked those flood waters and created that big lake from the old quarry? I saw her do that. I saw her lift that chunk of bedrock that turned that rain-swollen creek five miles into the other direction and save millions of dollars of private property." He plucked a strip of bacon into his mouth. "We now call that Superior Creek."

"Superior Creek?" Bartlett asked.

"Tried calling it Supergirl Creek, but the local town council wouldn't pass it."

"Dale…" Bartlett looked over. "What about this rumor she lives out of a decommissioned missile base? Have you had them all checked?"

"Do you realize…" Gilchrist was chuckling. "How much trouble I'd be in with the American people with I wasted tax dollars to go looking for a person the majority of the country says doesn't exist?"

"Well…" Ben looked up to Booth. "Maybe that's why no one has ever been able to figure out just where she is…" He sipped his juice.

Forty-five miles south of Bermuda in the equally mysterious stretch of sea known as the Bermuda Triangle, Bridget got the attention of another confused flier flying in gas fumes and guided him back to the airport in Miami. If her power allowed her to time travel, she would have done the same thing for the five missing Avengers of December 5, 1945, but she stayed the night in Miami and dumped three drug lords in an upside down trash dumpster outside the Miami Police Department for Horatio Caine to deal with before breakfast. She was in Atlanta next on an Amber Alert, leaving a pedophile hanging from a cell phone tower by his underwear, and in Nashville, saving the life of an intoxicated teenager trying to dodge a speeding train at a crossing. Near Litchfield, Illinois, she re-guided a tractor-trailer on to the highway after its driver started dozing off at the wheel, and in Hiram, Iowa, she stopped a youth from blowing off his hand with a stick of dynamite stolen from a construction site. Not staying to hear the glory or praise from another grateful mother, she was in Pawkett, Nebraska, Saskatchewan, Canada, Lutherville, Idaho, Tucumpari, New Mexico, the Southeast Utah desert and heading toward California for dinner. Piper and Leo invited her to stay for dinner in San Francisco to hear of her adventures and second thoughts of doing this for another year. They tried to console her over her loneliness, but they weren't sure if they had anything truly insightful to tell her. Following getting caught on camera in Sacramento foiling a fleeing drug-pusher trying to escape the police for the CBI and the attempted murder of a dancer in Las Vegas for Detective Jim Brass, Bridget was soon gliding on the winds over Los Angeles and casually cruising the skies over the fifth floor Law Offices of Harrison and Parker. Actress Stacy Barnett sawing her buzz the building first and tried to show her best friend, but Jane scoffed with friendly grin, called her assistant Fred over and motioned him to her office. The puckish and likable young man followed Jane through the law office. Though large and slight in build at the same time, the lovely brunette lady lawyer moved with a grace on dainty footsteps and light gestures left over from her previous life as Deb Dobkins, a young beauty who had lost her life in a fatal car accident and who had been reborn in this life as Jane Bingham, a strong-willed career woman. Fred had followed her from the afterlife to keep an eye on her, even taking a job as an assistant in her law firm to pull it off, but there were often things coming up from his past duties that kept creeping up.

"Fred, could you tell Grayson I'd like to see him?"

"Sure…" Fred promised and looked up to Jane, but in his eye-line was an attractive young blonde slowly rising up alongside the window in a red cape and blue "Supergirl" costume. Arms crossed, her legs closed together in a levitating pirouette… Bridget floated up into view trying to get his attention. "I… I…"

Jane turned her head into the window, but Bridget had vanished out of sight.

"As soon as he gets back from lunch…" Fred promised.

"Thank you…" Jane watched Fred dash out of the office into the outer work area. Hastening around Terri at her desk outside Jane's office, he bolted for the windows and looked out over the Los Angeles skyline. He was used to Bridget shooting past the building one in a while, but she had never stopped and looked into the windows. Just what was that girl thinking? The last time he had seen her was over doughnuts and coffee at Christmas, before that it was during a mess the Halliwell Sisters had with Ares, the former Olympian god of war. Before that, he was present when she tried storming the gates of heaven over the fate of her father and threatened to give up her godly gifts. Admittedly, he had a bit of a slight infatuation with her, but right now, his fondness for her was tempered by her peeking in the window at him. Sent racing from window to window in the law firm muttering her name under breath, he finally reached the firm's exterior balcony landing where the lawyers often stepped to catch a smoke or clear their head.

"Bridget?" He looked around for her and closed the doors behind him. "Bridget?!" He looked down to the ground for her.

"I'm over here." She was standing on the ledge to his right.

"What are you doing poking your head in windows?" Fred turned round to her. "You've never done that before…"

"Actually I have…" Bridget hopped over to him with her cape swaying from her shoulders. "But I was trying to get your attention, and you immortals aren't listed in the phone book."

"And there's a reason for that…" Fred acted out an example by using his hand as a fake phone to his ear. "Hello, Fred, I'd like my own house and bigger boobs…"

"I was thirteen at the time and self-conscious, okay." She knew when he was imitating her. "Look… you said I could come to you any time when I was having a crisis of faith, and, well, you've kind of got this direct line to God…"

"Not right now…" Fred looked to see if Kim was looking for him. "In case you haven't noticed, I've kind of been demoted since someone I'm not naming right now hit the "return" button." He was talking about model Deb Dobkins whose spirit now inhabitant Jane. "Talk to Earl…"

"Well, I'd talk to Earl in Albuquerque…" Bridget referred to the guardian angel of New Mexico police detective Grace Hanadarko and moved her head back and forth emphatically. "But he always seems to know when I'm coming… and disappears… So, I'm talking to you instead."

"I can't do this now…"

"I'm quitting…" She confessed.

"What?" She had his ear.

"I can't do it anymore." She shook her head. "I can't keep disposing of my life when things get too close. Kerry finding me forced me to realize I want to go home, and running into my father in Pittsburgh made it worse. I'm quitting, and yet, I still care about Leonard. I can't just vanish on him to restart a new life again with another name and identity!"

"You did it with Zack and Cody…"

"Yeah, but…"

"And Jason and the Halliwell Sisters…."

"That's different, they…"

"And don't forget…"

"Stop doing that!" She dropped down on the ledge and struggled between heart and mind.

"Bridget," Fred gave in and swung his legs over to sit next to her. "I know you love your job, but giving it up to go home is a selfish thing… You can't give it up now. You're destined for great things… You can't throw it all away just because you're lonely."

"I don't want to give it up…" Bridget was crying. "I just think God made a mistake giving me these powers…"

"It was no mistake." Fred placed his arm around her back as her head rested on his shoulder. "You had these powers coming… He just… woke them up…"

"Great…" Bridget rolled her eyes. "I can't even give them away…"

"Who were you going to try giving them to?"

"Maddie…" Bridget recalled an old friend. "She always wanted the power to change the world."

"That candy girl at the Tipton in Boston?" Fred made a face of amused disbelief then recanted and thought about it. "You might be a little too late…"

"Oh my God…" Bridget looked to him and hopped back over to the ledge. "You're kidding me…." Maddie was also destined to become an angel? "You ruined that poor girl's life…"

"Irene recommended her…" Fred knew the girl's guardian angel. "You never wondered why people thought you looked both like Reese Witherspoon and Ashley Tisdale?" He looked to Bridget. "And we didn't ruin her life. We unleashed her full potential like we did with you…."

"Which one of her friends or relatives are you holding hostage on her?" Bridget became upset. "Who's going to die if she tries giving up her powers?"

"God doesn't work like that!" Fred confessed. "That's just an empty threat Zeus came up to motivate you." He chuckled at her. "Heck, he told Leonardo Da Vinci Greece would disappear into the sea if he didn't do the Sistine Chapel."

"That was Michelangelo…"

"Doesn't matter…" Fred chuckled and looked dreamily up to her. "Bridget… God isn't concerned where you live or who you live with… Your father won't die if you return home. He wants you to be happy." He paused and admired her innocence. "Bridget Hennessey, do your realize how much good you've done? As you told Kerry, the lives you've touched have touched other lives, and those lives have touched others…. Why would He want to stop that?"

Bridget looked at him.

"Are you telling me…" Bridget looked at him. "I could go home anytime I wish…"

"If you can do it without exposing your secret…" Fred responded. "Trust me, Bridget, the world isn't ready for that… and your family… they already know and love you that much more for it."

"The world… my family… There's no way…" She had a huge problem. As far as the world was concerned, she had been taken out by a serial killer almost ten years ago. Bridget Hennessey as a person no longer existed. Although her parents refused to believe it, the police had given up trying to find her. Most crime writers thought she was going to turn up as a pile of bones somewhere on the Upper Michigan Peninsula. "How can I go home without the entire world asking where I've been?"

"Bridget…" Fred mused still a bit in love with her. "If you can find a way, go for it."

The blonde one thought of her mother in Michigan. Considering the time difference, her mother would be getting home from the hospital about now. Back to working as a sports news reporter, her father would be home too. Her grandfather had come to stay with them after his divorce, and CJ had moved in after leaving the army to get back on his feet. Kerry was home as well and building a career as a lawyer. The only one not there was Rory away at college on his basketball scholarship. Bridget wanted to be there with them to tell them she loved them, but how long would it take in that crowded house before her father discovered her in her costume or before her mother inquired about her nearly endless fortune? Maybe she could live nearby under another alias… If she could fake a British accent as Linda Kent, how about a French accent? What if she lived near her family as Billie Daniels? What about Chloe Tisdale, the identity she had in Boston at the Tipton? No, her mind realized there was no way she could keep up the pretense, and what about Leonard, Howard, Bernadette and her friends in Pasadena? She didn't want to vanish from their lives either. There had to be a way she could live in both worlds and keep her real life a secret. She thought it over and mulled every possibility over the next following days. That week, she stopped an avalanche on the Seattle coast that week by fortifying the collapsing ground with a chunk of solid bedrock taken from down the coast, she prevented a two plane collision in London and she practically stopped an entire train by ripping open a box car to rescue a kidnapped adolescent near Grand Rapids. That close to home, she couldn't help but briefly dye her hair black, fake a New York accent and hide her identity under a baseball cap and work suit to slip into her old house under Kerry, her father, Cousin CJ and Grandpa to fix the stopped up pipe in the kitchen as a fake plumber. CJ even tried hitting on her, but then her mother started getting close enough to nearly recognize her and Bridget conjured a bit of poltergeist activity upstairs to distract them that she could escape. It was a close call, but it just fortified her desire to be back home that much more and somehow bring Leonard with her. That's when the idea finally hit her…

"It had to be Bridget, Paul…" Cate was convinced. "I know my daughter!"

"Cate…" Paul sighed and looked lovingly upon his wife. "I met this girl entering the house. I think I would know my daughter."

"Really…" Cate moved through the house cleaning and picking up cups through the living room. "Why did she dash out of the house out the back door without getting paid… five minutes before the real plumber showed up?!"

"Well… well…" Paul tried to think of an answer then looked at CJ by his side sipping a cup of coffee over the coffee pot.

"Don't look at me for answers…" CJ mumbled disinterested in their debate. "I was busy undressing her with my eyes."

Both Paul and Cate looked disgustedly offended to him.

"Phone's ringing…" CJ heard the house phone ringing. Ed looked up from his newspaper in his chair. Kerry was typing up her court notes from a local crash-and-dash case she was defending.

"Okay…." Paul surrendered to Cate. "Maybe she was homesick and had some time…" He noticed CJ, lowered his voice and whispered to Cate. "…Between terrorists, pedophiles and criminals to sneak in and see how we were doing?"

"Because…" Trying to eavesdrop on their secret conversation, Kerry looked up to them. "Like I said, she's still as sneaky, deceptive and manipulative as she has always been… just like I've been saying."

"Kerry, I refuse to believe…"

"Aunt Cate…" CJ stopped what was about to be another talk about the family secret and held up the phone. "There's a Detective Mac Taylor on the phone from New York City… He wants to talk to you or Uncle Paul."

"A detective…" She looked at him. "What did you do?"

Paul and Cate exchanged looks. Ed looked over his newspaper.

"I've never even been to New York…" CJ lightly scoffed and handed her the phone. A memory came to him he thought he had forgotten years before. "They couldn't have found that stuff. Stinky said he buried it really deep…" He was mumbling.

"Hello…" Cate answered the phone.

"Mrs. Hennessey…" A distinct voice of authority spoke. "This is Detective Mac Taylor. I'm with the New York City Forensics lab. I'm calling about your daughter, Bridget Hennessey."

"Bridget…" Cate feared the worst. Upon hearing his daughter's name, Paul stopped to listen in interest, and both CJ and Kerry turned around to listen to the phone call. Her father lowered his paper even more to eavesdrop as well. This was where she feared they announced finding her daughter's body in a deserted Brooklyn house next to Jimmy Hoffa or in an unmarked grave with Dorothy Arnold in Central Park. Please don't let it be true. Let this be a false alarm like the last one.

"Mrs. Hennessey…" Mac looked through the hospital ward centered on the victims of a current case. Twelve girls had been rescued from an underground sex ring through an anonymous phone call to the police. Doctors were checking the young girls all out for venereal disease and injuries. One of them seemed healthier than the rest. Mac stopped and looked up at Bridget. "We found her, she's alive, and we got her here."

From the bed, Bridget looked up to Detective Taylor as a nurse checked her. She was taking a big chance to bring herself back to life…


	25. Chapter 25

25

That Friday morning, Paul's plane landed in Manhattan, and afterward, a cab took him straight to the hospital. In his mind, all sorts of things were going on? If this was Bridget, it meant that she could not be Supergirl, but if she wasn't, could this girl just be another girl with Bridget's identity? Could there even be another possibility? Whatever the truth, what he found here would answer two questions at once. Was the girl he had raised from infancy a costumed adventurer, and where had she been hiding all these years? Stepping from the elevator, Paul checked at the nurse's station.

"Bridget Hennessey?" He asked.

The nurse directed him to Detective Don Flack.

"Mr. Hennessey?" Don turned around from talking to a doctor. "I'm Detective Flack. I'm working with Mac Taylor on this case."

"Is it my daughter? Are you sure?" Paul held his chest. His heart valve was about to burst.

"We checked her fingerprints on the familiars you had left with the Detroit police after her disappearance. It's definitely her."

"A sex ring?" Paul was shocked and appalled at the details of her disappearance. "How?"

"These people have a state wide underground network moving girls through the country." Flack revealed. "Do you recall that Detroit arrest of Dennis Oliver Patrick and James Oliver Karlen a while back? They're a part of it, and although they denied grabbing your daughter, we now have the evidence to bust their entire network… all thanks to a mysterious tip from a girl in a red cape."

"Yeah…" Paul thought again about that girl. "Have you ever seen…"

"I had a splitting glimpse of her at month ago during her purge of our offices of explosives…" Don paused to reflect. "I think she's real, and you owe her thanks. Man, she helped you get your daughter back…"

Paul had just casually looked off to the side and saw a nurse wheeling a girl out to meet him. At first glance, he thought the young lady was similar, but as she got closer, there was no mistake. It was Bridget… She was taller than he recalled and hair was longer, her face was tanner but her blue eyes… those big blue eyes, he recalled them. Father and daughter met eyes, and Bridget jumped up hugging him amidst several tears and short breaths. Paul squeezed her back not wanting to let her go. She was taller than he recalled. When he saw Bridget again with his own eyes again, his heart began pumping faster. They hugged crying their eyes out surrounded by the parents of other missing girls, all of them from parts all over the country either yanked from arrival at Grand Central Station or from nearby cities in nearby states. Father and daughter were reunited. It had been so long. Bridget cried and wept holding her father again. Paul squeezed her lovingly to have her back. He swore he'd never let her go again. Off to the side, Don realized these were the moments on the job he lived for and then clicked his buzzing cell.

"Flack…"

"Don, can you get to the warehouse?" Mac and Danny were still processing the building the girls had been found in. "There's something here you need to see."

"I'm on my way…" Don patted Paul on the shoulder to lend his support and returned back to business. Twelve girls had been rescued from a small warehouse room with bars on the windows. Twelve girls… maybe. Mac stared at the windows. All the windows had been boarded up but this one. Five men and three female accomplices had been arrested in the bust. Taylor stood watching Danny process the tenement the precinct had invaded to discover the girls.

"Mac, look at this…" Messer directed Taylor's view to the bars on the windows. "Boards and bars on all the windows, but on this one…" He stooped before the window and pretended to grip them. "And… these two are distorted as if someone really powerful bent them apart and then bent them back."

"Could be a manufacturing error at the foundry."

"Except…" Danny showed him the indents. "They're shaped like fingers. What sort of defect causes that?"

Mac slowly exhaled. He was not sure what to make of all these super-blonde stories that kept occurring.

"So, this… being…" He paraphrased for lack of a better word. "Bends the bars wide to free the girls then changes her mind? Why would she do that?"

"Maybe not to let them out, but to get in herself." Danny guessed.

"So one of those girls is possibly the mystery blonde everyone is calling Supergirl…" Mac thought about it. "Passing herself off as one of the victims…"

"Hernandez did say he only had eleven girls." Messer reminded him. Mac exhaled deeply and thought about it. Why would this girl want to vanish back into society by pretending to be a victim of Hernandez's sex slave ring? He mulled it over. Which of the twelve was it? Should he try to find out?

"Danny, make a note on it and file it, but don't press on it." Mac decided. "I don't want to be the one to out this girl's identity to the world when she's done so much." He paused. "Let her have her secret identity."

"Aren't you the least bit curious?" Messer was excited. "We are right on top of discovering who she is before anyone else!"

"Not interested…"

"Aw, come on. Mac…." Danny was incredulous.

"She saved our lives." Mac looked back with a wry grin. "We can give her that."

At that moment, Bridget was on her first airplane flight in her life taking a trip that she could cover in less than ten minutes. Her father was unable to stop grinning. He had offered to take her shopping, but she wasn't interested. It was then that Paul realized she had changed. Shopping and spending money had been Bridget's mantra since before her disappearance. No, that wasn't right. She had stopped acting that way even much earlier… about the time Supergirl first appeared in Detroit all those years ago. That realization now hit him. Could becoming this heroine have changed her personality in a way he was just now realizing? If his daughter was Supergirl, why had she been found held captive with all those other kidnapped girls? Maybe she wasn't a captive. Maybe this was her way to come back home…

Getting out of Manhattan had been a challenge. When the New York Press learned Detroit sports writer Paul Hennessey's long lost daughter had been found as part of a top local news story, they had tracked him through La Guardia Airport trying to get a comment, and the press in Detroit was likely to be less forgiving. Luckily, after calling Cate, he learned that she worked at the hospital with the wife of one of one Detroit's top police officers, Captain Mike Hammond, and Hammond arranged for Paul and Bridget to spirit them off the airport through the gate and get them home to miss the press and still reasonably make it home. It was already dark and the lights on the highway home were already on. Fretting and anxious, Cate was a nervous wreck. She had waited years for her daughter to show up alive and healthy, and she would stay up until midnight to have her back. The whole idea that Bridget was Supergirl was finally dead in the water. No one was going to make that assumption again… However, Kerry was conflicted. How could this whole abduction story be true if she had found Bridget in Pasadena? Even with the partial remnants of the hypnosis still on her to block out her memories of the meeting, all Kerry could think about was... who the heck was Penny Parker?

"I bet you're excited to finally have Bridget home." CJ asked her.

"Yeah…" Kerry mumbled.

"You don't sound excited." CJ looked her over.

"I'm excited…" Kerry rolled her eyes to her cousin.

"Really…." CJ looked her over. Kerry was standing and leaning on the kitchen counter sipping a glass of orange juice with a blank look on her face as if someone had rained on her parade. She looked more annoyed than anything else.

"Well," CJ looked her over again. "Don't get too excited… you might sprain a muscle cracking a smile."

Kerry shot a look at him.

"What's the family secret?" CJ asked.

"You were raised by monkeys."

"She's home!" Cate came racing down from stairs after changing into her fifth dress. "She's here." She had seen Paul pull into the driveway from the upstairs window. "My baby's home! She's really home!"

"Cate…" Her father called from the big chair. "Help me up so I can hug my granddaughter."

"Careful, Grampy…" CJ strolled closer. "You might break a hip."

"I'll break your leg." Ed swung his cane at his impudent grandson then stood and listened to his son-in-law coming into the house. The front door cracked at Paul looked through grinning and right behind him was a familiar statuesque blonde girl in a white sweater and faded blue jeans. Nervously looking up, Bridget lifted her head just as her mother grabbed her and squeezed her with tears streaming down her face. Hugging her mother tightly, Bridget felt her cousin CJ reaching to hold her and give a small platonic kiss. Her grandfather hugged her next and stroked her face. She still had the same look he had seen that day in the drugstore when she saved his life, but now, it was more scared and more nervous. Cate hugged and squeezed her daughter again crying and laughing and joy as she rocked her little girl back and forth. Rory was on his way home from college to see her. Her grandmother was coming from Florida and her aunt from Texas. Through the whole happy and momentous occasion, Paul looked over to Kerry struggling with her thoughts and conflicting memories. Looking up from her mother's arms, Bridget and Kerry realized each other's presence.

"Care-Bear?"

"Bridget…" Kerry looked at her emotionally distant. She felt Bridget pulling her close to hug her and realized she had been here before. What the hell happened to her in Pasadena? Who the hell was Penny Parker?!

"I missed you so much, Kerry…" Bridget embraced her.

"This seems awfully familiar." Kerry rolled her eyes and tried to be civil. Her mother was grinning contently. Her grandfather was grinning ear to ear, and her cousin even forced a contented grin.

"I am making your favorite dinner." Cate marched grinning into the kitchen. "Macaroni and cheese with little sausages!" She grinned ecstatically.

"That's not my favorite…" Bridget looked confused. Her mother slammed the frying pan down.

"Whose favorite was it?!" She yelled.

"No one!" CJ revealed the truth. "You just make it because it's easy to make!"

"Cate," Paul hugged Bridget and turned back to his wife. "Beej and I ate on the plane…" He paused happily content. "Did you hear me? I said "Beej" again! My baby's home!" He hugged and kissed his daughter's face.

"I'm just very tired, mom…" Bridget felt secure in her father's arms. "I just want to go to bed and get some sleep."

"Of course, honey…" Cate kissed and squeezed her daughter several seconds more and forced herself to let go. Unable to stop smiling, she beamed ecstatically and deliriously happy to her husband to have both her daughters finally home. CJ was watching from a distance unsure how to act, but Ed remembered seeing Bridget save his life in the drugstore. What sparkle she had then was not as obvious now. The blonde one acted as if all the energy and spirit in her had been used up. She was quiet, tired and distracted as if she were trapped in a dream.

"Bridget…"

"Yes, grandpa?" The girl looked to him as she followed Kerry back up to their room. Ed looked into her face. No make-up, no expression, just tired and worn out. If he thought Bridget and the girl in the cape were one and the same, he was not so convinced now.

"Good to have you home."

"Thank you, grandpa." Bridget turned and exhaustedly followed Kerry back up stairs as if no time had passed between now and the last time she was home. Her parents were excitedly more than she knew to have her home, but it was also obvious they were holding back from attacking her with questions on how she had survived for ten years imprisoned in an illegal forced prostitution ring. In all those years, it sounded logical that she had to have tried to escape or make her existence known, but they didn't doubt the story at all. They were just glad to finally have her home. Kerry was the only person who had her doubts about the whole thing. The whole thing seemed too… convenient. She had read about the men who ran those things. They generally murdered girls who refused to cooperate and those who tried to escape were usually never seen again. There was only one other logical conclusion.

"Bridget…." Kerry's voice stammered as they returned to their room together for the first time in over ten years. "I'm going to ask this one last time and then I'm never going to ask it again." She closed her eyes, lowered her head and tried to talk. Her throat was dry, her head was light and her voice quivering. "Are you Supergirl?"

Bridget sighed back on the sight of her old bed in her old room then drew quiet.

"Kerry…." Bridget sounded annoyed. "Do you know where my old comforter is?"

"Yes, Bridget…." Kerry stuck to her promise and reached to the trunk to pull out Bridget's old comforter. She lifted the lid, picked up the comforter by the edge and lifted it out as something fell out of it. She placed the wrap before Bridget then turned to pick up what had fallen out of it. In the darkened room, it looked dark but when she turned around she found a flash of red and yellow. Turning it around, she recognized it for what it was. It was a girl's blue leotard with the Superman symbol on it. A sorceress named Samantha Stephens had weaved it for Bridget to be bulletproof and flame retardant. Her eyes widened to be holding it. She felt her heart beating faster. This was it! She turned to her sister standing before her beaming ear to ear.

"I've, uh…" Bridget wiped away a tear for this emotional moment. "I've kind of got a date with Leonard in thirty minutes. Think you could cover for me?"

"What?" Kerry reacted confused for just a moment before the realization reached her mind. Maybe the hyponosis was finally wearing off after all... She remembered being in Pasadena, meeting Leonard and Howard, their talk, the confrontation, their heart-to-heart talk... She started crying as Bridget took her costume from her sister then pulled her close and hugged her.

"I always trusted you..." Bridget whispered to her then gently pushed her away. She picked up her skirt, cape and boots and backed from her sister toward the window. Kerry watched as her sister sat down into it, ducked under the windowsill then dropped down into thin air. Kerry rushed to see where she went, but her sister had just vanished into that blink of an eye between the seconds on the clock. Looking up, she saw a shadow crossing the sky over the neighborhood. Brushing her teeth at that moment, Cate noticed the red and blue flash beyond the corner of her eye outside her window. Behind the house, Paul dumped the trash into the garbage cans and saw the shape pass over his house.

"No…" He tried to convince himself. "Please, God, tell me I didn't see that…"

Her fist extended before her, Bridget scowled as she fought to climb higher. Rain vapor formed in her hair and costume as she climbed higher. She couldn't let Leonard down this time. She just couldn't. Speeding faster through the air, her long tresses of blonde hair blew backward against her shoulder and cape. Nearing the state line near Chicago, she started mentally rehearsing things she had to tell Leonard to pass off her revised past to him.

"It turns out I was adopted. My biological family lives in Detroit…" Her mental voice rehearsed to Leonard on their date.

In Pasadena, Leonard was getting dressed for his date with the girl he knew as Penny Parker. He pulled on his dark slacks and pulled out his new white shirt. It was brighter and cleaner than his others.

Over North Missouri near Kansas City, Bridget ripped across the darkened skies of farmlands and made cattle flutter and respond from the phenomenon over their heads. Upon counting the lights of the large cities beneath her, Bridget swerved even more westward to return to Leonard. Her mind was still working out a way to tell him who she really was and merge both the worlds of Penny Parker and Bridget Hennessey into one…

"My birth name is Bridget Erin Hennessey…" Penny's voice echoed in Bridget's head.

"Bridget!" Paul rushed through his house to finally expose his daughter's secret costumed identity once and for all. Cate was right behind him. Was the sex slave thing just a scam and excuse to hide her whereabouts for the last few years from the world? They approached the girl's upstairs room and pushed their way in then stopped. The shape of their daughter's body filled her bed, and Kerry was right there next to it. There was even blonde hair poking up over the top of the blanket.

"It's a nice firm…" Kerry sat by the human-sized lump under the blankets on her bed and seemed to be catching up her sister on her past. "Miss Flockhart says I have a very good chance of getting a position there..." She looked up to her parents peeking in through the door and then looking back at each other confusingly. Bridget seemed to be in bed. She couldn't be flying over the house. Dismissing the thought, Paul and Cate backed back out and tried to permanently put to the past all their past fears and suspicions. Behind the closed door, Kerry placed her hand to her heart and took a deep breath.

"Okay, what have I not told you about…." Kerry continued. "Oh, remember Kyle? He's now running a comic book shop…" She heard the door latch as her parents backed out of the room silently. Taking a cue from her sister in manipulating the perceptions of others, she patted the pile of clothes under the blankets with the blonde wig. It was the same trick Bridget had pulled in high school when she was concealing herself sneaking out of the house. "Just like old times…" Kerry realized that all that subterfuge was good practice for hiding her sister's secret identity from the general public.

Traffic on Interstate 207 in the Oklahoma panhandle slowed as the whistling sound of an object shot over them. Someone said it looked like a small basketball rushing at great speed over their heads while others said it looked like a girl in a red cape. In Pasadena, Leonard was cleaning his shoes and trying to get them to shine for his date. Wondering how Penny was going to look, he checked his breath and thought he better gargle with mouthwas once more. Approaching the state line, the blonde goddess started realizing that in addition to adapting her past as Bridget to Leonard, she just had to explain things about her past to her parents too.

"Mom, you're not going to like this, but while I was gone, I actually finished high school and college…" She mentally rehearsed the truth.

In Pasadena, Leonard was nervously brushing his hair once more. As Bridget's flight passed over New Mexico and reached Albuquerque, she was wondering how to explain Leonard to her father.

"Daddy, I'm dating this guy named Leonard." Her imagination played the scene in her mind. "I met him while I was living in Pasadena."

Clean and dressed, Leonard exited his apartment and buttoned and unbuttoned his dark blue jacket. His tie hung discreetly from his collar. A few steps and he was at Bridget's door. He knocked once for her and waited. Several hundred miles away, his date was swerving to miss flights over Las Vegas. Lowering to check her landmarks, she saw a police pursuit of a speeding red Mercedes and suddenly deviated from her flight. In Pasadena, Leonard stood in the hallway of his apartment building, sighed, checked his watch and waited. Bridget's apartment seemed quiet. His head slightly cocked to one side, he knocked once more.

"She couldn't have forgotten again." He mumbled. "She couldn't have."

He knocked again then checked her apartment door. It was locked. There was no light under the door.

"Of course…" Accepting the inevitable, Leonard turned away and pulled out his cell phone to call her. He pulled up Penny's number, tapped it and rang her phone. It rang and rang again.

"Hello, this is Penny…" Her voice mail came on. "Please leave a message." He heard the beep. Stood up again… He started wondering if trying to date Penny was really worth it, but then he mentally flashed back on how beautiful she looked on the double date with Howard and Bernadette.

"Penny," Leonard started leaving a message on her phone. "Where are…"

"Leonard…" Bridget's door suddenly opened. "Why are you calling me?" She flashed her cell phone at him. She looked incredible. Garbed in a simple red dress with her hair blown out long and wavy, she looked like a supermodel. The young physicist felt his heart beating faster.

"I thought you'd forgotten." Clicking off her phone, Leonard felt like a young boy before her. "You look beautiful."

"Thanks…" Bridget turned to lock her door and place the keys in her purse. "So, where are we going to eat?"

"Do you feel like Italian?"

"I'm always in the mood for Italian." She let Leonard take her dainty hand as they headed down the stairs. In her mind, Bridget was rehearsing one more future potential conversation she was going to have this week.

"Leonard… I'm Supergirl…"

END


End file.
